The Girl from Berlin, #1

by Ellie Midwood

  He grinned at me and slightly squeezed my knee.

  “Your husband is a very lucky man, Frau Friedmann. Tell him that I told you that.”

  “I will, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  Right after he handed my suitcase to the porter, Gruppenführer Kaltenbrunner kissed me goodbye on the cheek, very close to my mouth. I closed my eyes when he touched me with his lips, I don’t know why but I felt a warm feeling spreading through my whole body. I guess I was just very drunk.

  When I opened the door to my suite, the first thing I saw was my husband pacing around the living room. As soon as he saw me, he rushed toward me, quickly closing the door behind my back.

  “Where the hell have you been?!” He noticed the suitcase in my hand. “And what is this?”

  “Shhhh!” I pressed a finger to my lips and whispered, “It’s the radio. I took it with me.”

  Heinrich looked at the suitcase as if it was a grenade, and I’d just taken the pin out of it. “You did what?!”

  “I took it with me. I thought we might need it in the future.” It was so heavy that I dropped it on the floor and giggled.

  “Annalise, are you drunk?”

  “Just a little.”

  I struggled to get my shoes off, lost my balance and almost fell, but Heinrich caught me midair and pressed me against the door so I wouldn’t fall again.

  “Where did you get so drunk?”

  “I was with Gruppenführer Kaltenbrunner. He invited me to go to a restaurant with him. He saw me with the suitcase and took it from me. If it wasn’t for him, the Gestapo would have gotten me. See? He’s not that bad. He even offered me a job in his office in Vienna.”

  “He offered you a job? What kind of a job?”

  “I don’t know, a job in his office. He didn’t go into details.”

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “He said, ‘why don’t you come work for me in Vienna, and I’ll take very good care of you.’ Those were his exact words.”

  Heinrich laughed.

  “He wants you to become his mistress.”

  “What?” I shook my head at my husband, dismissing all his allegations. “He never said anything like that!”

  “What do you think he meant by ‘taking very good care’ of you?”

  “I don’t know. Salary.”

  Heinrich laughed even harder.

  “You’re such a naïve little girl, I swear to God! The correct interpretation of his words would be: ‘why don’t you move to Vienna, so I can rent a nice little apartment for you where I’ll be visiting you after work? And since I’m giving you a position in my office, when I feel lonely during my lunch break, you’ll keep me company. And I’ll make sure that you have everything that a Gruppenführer’s mistress could ever wish for.’”

  Still slightly swaying on my feet, I looked at my husband for a moment, contemplating if that’s what Gruppenführer really implied.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know it for a fact, sweetheart. I’m a man too.”

  I found it very funny and giggled again. I suddenly thought how handsome my husband was and threw my arms around his neck.

  “Kiss me, Heinrich, you look so pretty tonight.”

  “God, you really had a lot to drink. I’m glad that Gruppenführer Kaltenbrunner dropped you off before you started kissing him.”

  I playfully smacked him on the head.

  “I would never do such a thing.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Paris, June 1940

  * * *

  This thunderstorm will never end. I didn’t even feel like getting out of the bed. What was the point anyway? I couldn’t go outside, and inside the Hotel Ritz was flooded with high ranking officers, the new occupants of Paris. The Führer himself was coming to observe yet another defeated city, and the big one: after the Great War it was on the French territory, where the, humiliating for Germany, Versailles Treaty was signed. Now, he couldn’t wait to rub their faces in it: look at us, the race of the conquerors, marching on your streets while you bow your heads.

  Things couldn’t have been better for the Reich: Western Poland was occupied, along with France and Norway. As a German I was supposed to be happy about our recent victories, but I couldn’t be sadder. The Reich had already taken my parents, who I hadn’t seen for a year already, and the only means of communication were occasional phone calls just to make sure that everybody was doing all right. I’m not even mentioning Adam and Dr. Kramer, who had to flee the country to save their lives. So many other Jewish friends were gone as well, either dead or taken to the concentration camps, like our former tailors, the Liebermans.

  My big brother, Norbert, was stationed somewhere in Poland, and was writing long letters to me, saying how much he wished that the war would be over already so life could go back to normal. After Warsaw fell, after a short siege, the Waffen-SS’ main task became the rounding up of the Jewish population and organizing ghettos for them. Mass executions also became a regular practice. Norbert didn’t want to tell me in his letters, but I knew that he had to participate in all this. His tone was getting more and more depressed.

  Even Ursula wasn’t keeping me company this time, but at least for a happy reason: she and Max were expecting their first baby next month, so she didn’t take the risk of traveling such a long distance. I remember after they first shared the news with us, Heinrich and I had a serious conversation.

  * * *

  “They look so happy,” I said, as we were strolling back home after a dinner at Max and Ursula’s. “I can’t believe they’re going to become parents soon.”

  “They’ve been waiting for this baby for more than three years, of course they’re ecstatic.” Heinrich said reluctantly. “I hope it’s a girl.”

  “Why a girl?”

  He slightly shrugged. “Because if it’s a boy, it’s just another future soldier for the Reich. Unfortunately, that’s how all Aryan children are seen now, especially the ones born from the members of the SS. As soon as he’s born, Reichsführer will personally baptize him, when he starts walking they’ll teach him how to march and give a Heil Hitler salute, right after Hitler Youth will follow, his first service dagger with Blood and Honor written on it, and then you get a perfectly brainwashed for years, product, an SS soldier blindly obedient to his Führer and ready to die for the victory of the ideals of National Socialism. That’s why I hope it’s a girl.”

  I went quiet for a moment. Sadly, Heinrich was right, through and through.

  “You don’t want to have any children, do you?” I finally dared to ask my husband a question that’s been bothering me for quite some time now.

  He put his arm around me and pressed me closer to him. “Of course I do, sweetheart. I would love to have five or even ten children with you.”

  I laughed.

  “But unfortunately they won’t be our children.” Heinrich continued. “They will be the children of the Reich.”

  I perfectly understood him. Even though I never shared those kind of thoughts with anyone, not even with Heinrich, but I was secretly glad that I hadn’t gotten pregnant so far. I wanted to have his children more than anything, but with all the chaos in our lives, with all the danger and risk we were taking, I couldn’t tolerate the thought that if we failed and got caught, our children would become the innocent victims of the “crime” that their parents committed against the Reich. And the Reich didn’t forgive treason.

  “What do you think we should do then?” I asked him after a pause.

  “Wait till it all ends,” he simply replied.

  “What if it never ends? What if we take over all Europe? What if the whole world will become a part of the Reich?”

  “It’s impossible. They will never let Hitler do that.”

  “Why are you so sure? Our war machine didn’t seem to have met any resistance so far.”

  “But when it will, then what happens? They’ll see that the people belonging to the ‘superior race’ are also made of bl
ood and bones. After they win their first battle they’ll see that the German army is not invincible as they thought before.” Heinrich looked straight ahead and sighed. “And then the Reich will fall.”

  I got chills after he pronounced those last words. No matter how much I didn’t like the Nazi regime, with all its terrors, the thought of its collapse terrified me. I still remembered the years of depression after the Great War, even though I was very small and our family was in a better position than most of the population, but the mood of the nation, along with hunger and desperation was still imprinted on my memory. No matter what my religion was, I was still a German, and would hate to see my country on its knees again.

  “And then what?” I hardly whispered.

  “And then, my dear, we’ll be finally free.”

  “Conquered.”

  “No, free,” Heinrich repeated firmly and then smiled at me reassuringly. “And then we can have all of our ten children.”

  * * *

  I looked out of the window again. The rain was coming down in buckets as if crying all the tears of the French nation. But even under the official occupation, the French didn’t give up fighting, even though it meant going underground. Tomorrow I was supposed to meet with one of the French Resistance members, who, as Heinrich told me, was going to become our radio operator here in Paris. My task was to deliver him a message.

  The phone rang. I picked it up thinking that someone was probably calling for Heinrich, but the porter with a strong French accent on the other end asked for Madame Friedmann.

  “This is Madame Friedmann,” I replied.

  “I have a gentleman here at the reception, he’s asking for you. He introduced himself as Monsieur Norbert Meissner.”

  “Norbert! This is my brother! Thank you for calling me, please tell him I’ll come down in five minutes.”

  “Absolutely, Madame.”

  I quickly changed into a dress, put my hair away in a messy bun, and almost ran downstairs to see my unexpected, but so dearly missed, visitor. I almost didn’t recognize him at first, a tall and broad shouldered man in a grey field SS uniform leaning on the reception; I couldn’t believe how much he’d matured after just one year of service.

  “Norbert!” I ran toward him and he caught me in his arms, easily lifting me up and kissing both my cheeks.

  “My baby sister!” A broad smile was playing on his face. “I haven’t seen you forever! You’ve gotten even prettier!”

  “And you’ve gotten older!” He finally put me down, and I pecked him on his unshaven cheek. “What’s that? A beard?”

  “I’m sorry, I was on the road for a couple of days and didn’t have time to shave yet. I couldn’t wait to see you first.”

  Even his smile wasn’t a little boy’s smile anymore. My brother was a real man now. I felt a little sad noticing two deep vertical lines in between his eyebrows: he must had been frowning a lot lately.

  “I’m so happy to see you, Norbert! But how did you manage to get here?”

  He shrugged. “My superior officer gave me leave for excellent service. I have the whole week, but with the road taking so much time, I can only spend a couple of days with you.”

  “I would be happy to see you even for a couple of hours! Let’s go by the bar and have a drink before dinner. You’re dining with us tonight, right? Heinrich will be very glad to see you; he’s constantly asking how they’re treating you there. You know, if you’re not happy with something, he knows a lot of people and can give somebody a call.”

  “Can he give a call to his boss Heydrich and ask him to stop giving orders for killing innocent people?” Norbert said quietly after picking up his army bag from the floor, but then quickly added, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up. You don’t need to hear about that.”

  “I’m not five, Norbert. I know what’s going on.”

  “No, you don’t, Annalise.” He shook his head and I saw those frown lines more distinctively. “You have no idea.”

  We were sitting by the bar and he was telling me about his army life, about his new friends, and how different the service was from what he’d expected.

  “We mostly do nothing all day, just walk around with rifles, that’s all. What kind of an army is that?” Norbert chuckled. “And the most ridiculous thing is that we’re guarding Jews in a ghetto, so they wouldn’t run away. Run away where? Back to Germany? It makes as much sense as guarding sheep in a field with machine guns. Like at some point you expect them to attack you! Some of them are so malnourished, they can hardly walk to work and back, leave alone trying to escape or organize a revolt.”

  Norbert paused for a little and then smiled as if remembering something. “You know, I sneak bread in for one kid over there and he shares it with his little sister and mom. His name is Moshe, he’s only nine but so savvy! When I was his age, I didn’t care about anything except playing ball with my friends. Children have to grow so fast now.”

  I took his hand in mine. I wanted my old Norbert back, the carefree one, the innocent. I wished he’d never seen what he had to see every single day.

  “You wrote to me that you made a lot of friends over there, though.” I tried to change the subject to distract him from depressing thoughts. “Are they good guys?”

  “They are, yes. When we were besieging Warsaw, we became like brothers. I know that they would die for me any minute, and I would die for them as well,” Norbert replied with a pensive look on his face, but then leaned closer to me and added very quietly, “The sad part is that if they ever found out that I’m Jewish, they would have hanged me on the first tree without blinking an eye.”

  “You’re lucky that you look very Aryan then.” I tried to joke, but it didn’t come out funny.

  “So are you.” Norbert took my hands in his. “I’ve missed you a lot. Mother and Father too. And my old buddy Milo. I feel like I didn’t appreciate it when we all lived together in our old house in Berlin. I would give anything to have it all back now, even for one day.”

  “I know, darling. Me too.”

  “I’m getting a promotion,” he said after a pause.

  “Really? Congratulations! You don’t sound too happy about it though.”

  “I’m not. They’ve just finished building a new concentration camp, Auschwitz, and my superior officer suggested me and a couple more soldiers to its Kommandant as ‘impeccable service men’ and ‘devoted to the ideals of the Reich Nazis.’” Norbert shook his head again. “So as soon as I’m back to Poland, I’ll become one of the guards over there. But don’t tell anyone, it’s kind of a… secret subject so far.”

  The new concentration camp? Don’t they have enough in Germany already? I sighed.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be that much different from guarding a ghetto, right? It can’t be worse than that?”

  Instead of replying, Norbert quickly jumped from his chair and gave a salute to someone behind my back.

  “Heil Hitler, Herr Gruppenführer!”

  I turned my head and almost laughed out loud. I could swear that Herr Gruppenführer Dr. Kaltenbrunner was following me from one country to another on purpose. But judging by the adjutant behind his back, who was giving orders to the porter about the suitcases, he was here for the signing of the peace treaty as well.

  “Heil Hitler, soldier. What the hell are you doing holding hands with a married woman, huh? Or you didn’t notice a ring on her finger?”

  I couldn’t help but smile at the already so familiar, mocking grin on his face.

  “She’s my sister, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  “Sister?” The leader of the Austrian SS greeted me with a little wink. “Yes, I definitely see the family resemblance now. And I already started worrying that you’re cheating on your husband with the regular Waffen-SS, Frau Friedmann.”

  “No, Herr Gruppenführer, I’m only cheating on my husband with the high-ranking SS officers, like yourself.”

  “You’d better, Frau Friedmann.” He grinned at me again.

/>   Both Norbert and Dr. Kaltenbrunner’s adjutant exchanged quick looks. Both clearly had no idea how we even knew each other and why I was speaking like that to such an important man. Meanwhile, I extended my hand to him and he shook it very gently with his leather gloved hand, after which he turned back to my brother.

  “So what’s your name, soldier?”

  “SS Untersturmführer Norbert Meissner, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  “Where are you stationed, Untersturmführer Meissner?”

  “Warsaw, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  “I’ve been there not that long ago.”

  “Yes, Herr Gruppenführer. You were inspecting the ghetto. I’m one of the guards.”

  “That’s right. Well, I’ll definitely be seeing you there a lot this summer, Untersturmführer Meissner. We have a lot of cleaning up to do, now that Poland is a part of the Reich.”

  Norbert clicked his heels, looking somewhere over Gruppenführer’s left shoulder, his face emotionless. Dr. Kaltenbrunner turned to me again. “Is Standartenführer Friedmann a part of the delegation?”

  “No, he’s just escorting Gruppenführer Heydrich. They’re in Paris on behalf of SD.”

  “Some Secret Intelligence work as always?” Gruppenführer Kaltenbrunner never made a secret out of a fact that he didn’t like the Chief of the Reich Main Security Office Heydrich and never missed a chance to mock him.

  “No, just being a part of an entourage as far as I know.”

  “And what are you doing here, Frau Friedmann?”

  “Shopping.”

  He chuckled. “I’ll see you around then.”

  “I’ll be looking forward to it, Herr Gruppenführer.”

  I gave him my hand again, but this time he kissed it instead of shaking it, and walked to the elevator, his adjutant nodding at me as he passed. Norbert returned to his seat, a concerned look on his face.

  “How do you know him?”

  “Well, let’s just say that for some reason unbeknown to me fate keeps bringing us together.” I smiled; Norbert didn’t.