The Girl Behind the Wall

by Mandy Robotham

  So, Karin is all too aware of the risk, of going out with someone who seems nice, if only on the surface. But what more can the GDR wring out of her? Their Wall has already stolen her family, and any hope of the career she loved so much. What possible harm can it do?

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’d love to.’

  17

  Happy Birthday to Me

  11th December 1961, West Berlin

  Jutta squats on the stool between the tall library shelves, cocooned by stacks of books and the white blanket of snow outside, quietly sobbing. Alongside the books she’s filing sit several birthday cards: one from Mama, another from Gerda, Oskar and Hugo. But not Karin.

  Normally, she wouldn’t work on their birthday – she and Karin always take a day’s holiday, either shopping or skating on the frozen ponds in the Tiergarten, followed by lunch and cocktails at the chic Hotel am Zoo. Not this year. Mama had tried her hardest, splashing out on a dress she thought her eldest daughter would like (though without Karin’s eye for her taste), but the forced jollity at breakfast only bruised Jutta’s heart more, and she spied her mother squirrelling away Karin’s present in the hall cupboard ‘for when she comes home’. Jutta imagines Ruth at her desk now, quietly weeping behind her office typewriter, keen to shed her distress before the evening birthday meal at home, with Karin’s place at the table conspicuously empty.

  A student approaches and begins scanning the shelves, and Jutta hastily rubs away her tears. He hovers, looks furtively around and bends towards her, whispering: ‘She says happy birthday. She’s well, being looked after. Don’t worry.’ And then he’s gone, sidling between walls of books before Jutta can rouse herself from the shock and pursue him for more information. Anything. The words are fleeting, and Jutta has to repeat them over and over to remind herself the encounter was real, before they disappear like snowflakes in a flurry. She’s well. What does that mean?

  The family chews it over repeatedly that evening.

  ‘But it’s good, isn’t it?’ Ruth says. ‘She wouldn’t have sent a message if she wasn’t all right, would she?’ Those few words have breathed a tiny amount of colour in her cheeks. Today of all days, it’s a less crippling reminder of her loss.

  ‘It is good,’ Gerda encourages. ‘If someone says she’s being looked after, it means she’s not alone, and that’s all we can hope for. Someone to help her.’ Ruth nods enthusiastically and, between them, they wring every ounce of consequence from eleven simple words.

  Jutta and Hugo leave the older women to their weaving of hope and retire to the roof again, despite the intense cold. It’s stopped snowing at least.

  ‘It does mean she’s free and not in custody,’ Hugo says, breaking their own bubble of silence above the muffled hum of street traffic below. He pinches the cigarette butt between his frozen fingers and tosses it into the small pile that’s collected by his chair.

  Jutta looks at him sideways. ‘What does free mean? Come on, Hugo, you know as well as I do how the GDR treats Westerners, Berliners especially.’

  They treat them as traitors – as East Germans who had previously chosen to opt out and hide in a pocket of the capitalist West. Hugo will know this because he hears and reads everything across the wire at the radio station, gleans information from foreign journalists who can traverse the border with their press cards – though the press talking to ordinary East Berliners in the street is frowned on by the Stasi informants, who are never too far away. Jutta has made herself aware, dipping back into the student body of the university where she studied and now works, hanging out in the campus café and listening to the fluchthelfers, the radical Wall-breakers who help to plot and plan escapes. They are tenacious and have no worries, it seems, beyond not being caught themselves. More importantly, they have little fear. But Jutta has little interest in their tall tales of adventure: instead she listens intently for any titbit about real life in East Berlin. And what she hears about those like Karin isn’t reassuring.

  ‘My girlfriend is still over there,’ one of a new group of tunnellers reveals one lunchtime. ‘She works part-time in a state shop. One of her colleagues used to work in the West, has a degree in engineering, but they refuse to let her study anymore or work as an engineer. They’re apparently paranoid about sabotage. So, instead, this woman is left stacking shelves, as punishment for choosing to favour the West.’

  Jutta’s heart had creased. Her sister has never been afraid of toil, had worked in a café all the way through her time at art college, but the idea that Karin’s creativity, her hankering to design, is being thwarted cuts her to the core.

  Getting her out, though, carries its own risks – not least the East’s determined ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy. Only that morning, Jutta had stared at the Morgenpost headline of yet more loss on the Wall: Dieter Wohlfahrt, just twenty, shot while helping others escape. She read the details of his death with true sadness, partly because such news is now all too frequent; this poor boy not the first but the tenth to lose his life, thanks to the Wall.

  The East German defence of their ‘protection barrier’ is zealous but sometimes haphazard, while the people’s will is determined and creative; in the first month alone after the Wall goes up, the successful escapes totalled four hundred and seventeen, though the attempts are likely to number many more. Some throw themselves at the Wall like a bull in a china shop, crashing through the jumble of breeze-blocks in heavy trucks, with mixed success. Others swim the River Spree cutting through Berlin, or the Teltow canal to the south, and a clutch have made an odorous journey through the sewers. Only the week before, one desperate train worker drove his scheduled passenger train full pelt towards the barriers of a border station, with twenty-four making the escape, including some family members. The first of many tunnels is already up and running. Berliners are nothing if not determined.

  But the consequence of failure is painfully clear to Jutta. In the East, they hear that hundreds – possibly thousands – are being imprisoned by the Stasi for long periods, since Republikflucht, or fleeing the Republic, is now officially a state crime in the GDR.

  Each senseless death and separation makes her think of Karin, of every family’s loss and bereavement, but the world doesn’t seem to share her pain. And yet Berlin does remain a political focus: over six days in October 1961, the walled enclave saw the world teetering on the edge of nuclear disaster, the consequence of another diplomatic spat over border access. Soviet tanks were deployed, met in equal numbers by American military hardware at Checkpoint Charlie, only feet apart, with their engines snorting fumes on one another. Each side inched towards the border – and all-out conflict. With bated breath, nations around the globe watched a high-risk game of poker being played out, neither government willing to give an inch. At stake was a full-scale war, possibly nuclear.

  Finally, and when the world could hold its breath no longer, John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided a small checkpoint was not worthy of a global catastrophe and resolved their differences over the phone, sending the tanks into reverse and trundling away. Alongside the rest of the world, Jutta sighed huge relief.

  That’s why Karin’s escape – if they get anywhere near planning it – needs to be foolproof.

  ‘Hey, let’s go in – it’s freezing out here,’ Hugo says, plunging into Jutta’s deep and dour thoughts. He holds out a hand to pull her up. ‘And cheer up for goodness sake – it’s your birthday.’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmurs. ‘Happy bloody birthday to me.’

  18

  ‘Happy Birthday to You’

  11th December 1961, East Berlin

  The alcohol makes her happy at first, slightly giggly and glad to be alive. Karin has never drunk champagne, and although Otto admits it isn’t the best, it’s still streets ahead of the cheap, fizzy Rotkäppchen wine East Germans seem to swallow heartily. But as they head towards her tiny flat after an evening out, the bubbles fall suddenly flat, causing clouds to mass above Karin. Dark clouds.

 
Inside, Otto examines a card from Walter and Christel and their generous present of a sewing machine, albeit one that’s second-hand and a little rusty. Walter’s other gift – begging a last favour to deliver a message to Jutta – is not so visible.

  ‘They think a lot of you, don’t they?’ Otto says. ‘I bet they’re nice people.’

  ‘They are,’ Karin says, and it’s then she can’t help the choke in her throat – with the day, the void of Jutta’s card, which she knows would have been sent if at all possible – but also the Simms’ unending generosity, and the fact that now she has someone to celebrate with. Otto Kruger. The man who had careered across the hospital corridor and whose loyal, heartfelt character is proving a big attraction. It’s taken only two or three dates, of coffee, dinner and then cinema, for her to realise he’s something special. And she thinks – hopes – he feels it too.

  Still, there’s a great hole in her heart, and the tears push forth for what she’s missing today: Mama, Gerda, Hugo and Oskar. And, most of all, Jutta. Otto knows she has a sister, but for some strange reason she can’t admit to him that Jutta is her twin. The other half, the reflection of her. It’s something Karin feels compelled to contain, from Walter and Christel too. Jutta’s mirror image she keeps safe. For her eyes only.

  Otto hears her sadness, sees the twist of her mouth. ‘Hey, come here,’ he comforts, pulling her into his torso, where her head only just reaches his chin. ‘I’m sure you’ll see them soon.’

  He can’t be sure, of course, and neither does he make excuses for the regime, but she’s glad of the words, that he’s trying. And she has plenty to be grateful for: her role at the Charité, a job Walter managed to secure after her convalescence; her own flat, albeit damp and tiny, plus the friendship of the Simms. And now Otto. The frustration is ever present, of writing endlessly to the apartment at Schöneberg and hoping that just one of her letters will reach them, then the crushing sight of an empty post hole every day. The fear of being plucked from the street and the crime of being a West Berliner have become things she might just learn to live with. And against Otto’s solid chest, she has never felt safer.

  He reaches into his pocket, pulls out something small and wrapped and offers it to her. ‘This seems all the more appropriate now I’ve seen your other present.’

  When Karin unwraps it, the tears spring again. It’s a simple, hand-stitched pin cushion in the shape of a ladybird, bright and beautiful, and she imagines he could have picked it out only with her in mind.

  ‘Oh it’s perfect,’ she breathes, palming at her wet cheeks.

  ‘Cheer up,’ he says, stroking her hair, his fingers reaching down to wipe away her sadness. ‘Not every day is your birthday, is it?’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Karin breathes into the rough wool of his jumper. Thank goodness.

  19

  In Between

  1961–1963, Berlin

  Inevitably, as it did in the first world war and again in the second, life goes on in Berlin. There is worldwide opposition but no sledgehammer, no physical pawing at the rough concrete blocks. In time, even the East Germans cannot pretend that their ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’ is anything other than ‘the Wall’, although they continue to defend it to the world both politically as well as physically.

  The initial fury from the West German side flares and fizzles to small pockets of opposition, consisting of underground operations rather than all-out defiance.

  Jutta watches her fellow Berliners with pride in the way they carry on. They’ve seen off Nazism, war, firestorms, invasion and famine, their city reduced to rubble rebuilt time and again. The increasingly fortified Wall divides but does not flatten the spirit of the people, though the international language slowly morphs: the ‘East’ comes to mean the grim austerity across the grey partition, and the ‘West’ represents freedom and democracy in a cosmopolitan ghetto – access to the latest clothes and Western music, the liberty to stroll into a hotel bar and order whatever you want, dance the night away to the latest hits from America or England. Like most Berliners, Jutta hopes this simplified description does not apply to the people, or the Berlin spirit, but inevitably it creeps into the general psyche.

  For the Voigts and the Zelles, there is life – there has to be – but loss too. For a few months, Jutta makes regular trips to the town hall and Herr Fleisch for advice, a little comfort and to fill in her requisite form for access across the border. Sometimes she goes just to talk, or to pluck at the box of tissues he keeps on his desk. He’s always kind and endlessly forbearing, never falsely encouraging, although his hair recedes a little more with each visit. The form always comes back with the same red stamp of refusal, until Herr Fleisch reveals he can no longer submit any forms. All West Berliners are henceforth to apply for a permit or visa at one of the ‘travel agencies’ the GDR proposes to set up in West Berlin, except the Western authorities won’t allow such agencies on their soil since it means recognising the communist state as legitimate. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg situation, with people – real people like Karin – stuck in the middle.

  It makes Jutta both sad and awash with fury in equal measure, and she spends many hours either crying or shouting her frustrations to Hugo up on their rooftop. Downstairs, in the apartment, she does her best to keep it under wraps, though when she does confide in Gerda about yet another refusal, she can’t help noticing that Oskar shrinks further into the armchair, turning away and busying himself with the radio dial. Over time, his face slowly becomes as grey as his undershirt, and Jutta is driven to ask Hugo: ‘Is your father ill?’

  ‘Depressed rather than ill,’ he mumbles, between puffs of his cigarette into the chill rooftop air, as they sit wrapped in jackets against the harsh winter. Hugo has grown professionally since the Wall, gained respect for his daring and guile in his reports to the radio station. Strangely, it’s been good for him, but these days he’s out more than he was before. ‘I suspect Papa had quite a bit of business over in the East, and that means he’s lost a lot of contacts.’

  Night after night, as she lies in her bed, staring at the smooth empty covers opposite, Jutta hears the whispered quarrels between Oskar and Gerda over money, Gerda berating her husband and his whinnying defences of ‘But what can I do, Gerd? Do you want me to dig a tunnel for business?’ Having virtually retired, Gerda is forced to pick up more work as a midwife to keep the apartment functioning. Deflated and in her own deep depression, Ruth tolerates the dull office job she hates, with too much time to sit and dwell over Karin’s fate.

  Of course, they contact the Charité frequently, but all enquiries are met with a resolute ‘We can’t discuss former patients.’ The British couple, fellow journalists in Hugo’s circle, have been ejected from East Berlin for ‘anti-communist actions’, and quit the city entirely when their reporting rights are curbed. Lucien and his valued foreign passport has gone elsewhere too. All avenues are at a dead end, it seems, leaving them with no clue as to where Karin is or what she’s doing.

  Jutta dreams of finding just one contact, a glimmer of Karin’s whereabouts, which would allow her to act. The university group she’s ingratiated herself into has passport holders who can apply for a permit and cross over to deliver messages: if only she knew where Karin was, she might begin to sow the seeds of an escape.

  The tunnelling and sewer routes Jutta discounts immediately, since Karin suffers from crippling claustrophobia, but there are alternatives. Some groups move fake Western passports over the border, with the escapees taking a circuitous path out of East Berlin, crossing the border into Denmark and then into West Germany. It’s successful for a while, until the GDR tightens up entry and exit visas and that method of escape is swiftly capped off.

  The extremes are to be applauded – one couple successfully swims the Havel River near Potsdam, towing their eighteen-month-old baby in a bathtub. The runners and jumpers continue, but those reckless attempts are dragged sharply into focus by eighteen-year-old Peter Fechter in 1962, who chances
his luck with a friend in making a run for it. He loses. Shot several times by border guards, he lies limp and dying in the channel of land between the two barriers known as the ‘death strip’, the Wall having multiplied, grown thicker and higher with each passing month. His cries for help echo off the brickwork, with desperate West Berliners only yards away on the other side of the divide. For an agonising hour Fechter lies bleeding, until East German police scoop up his flaccid body and take him away. The hour is enough for worldwide press and television to record the tragedy and, once again, Berlin’s ugly scar is under the world’s spotlight. Fechter becomes an icon, an unwitting martyr, and there are violent protests and a series of small explosions on the Western side to mark the anger.

  For Jutta, the sad demise of Peter Fechter, along with the other escapees, serves as further proof that any attempt to free Karin has to be watertight. Nothing is ever risk-free, but as much as they want her back, it has to be in one piece.

  Depression is not in Jutta’s nature, but she finds herself existing in a kind of half-life, even when Irma, being a good friend, does her utmost to keep her included in their circle. Still, Jutta avoids the Kurf’damm when she can, although sometimes it’s hard to resist. One day in late September of ’62, she is sitting with Irma under the red and white pavement canopy of Kranzler’s and glimpses a woman walk by, in a simple but distinctive shift dress, edged in a deep purple. It’s unmistakable. Jutta has seen it hundreds of times, hanging in their wardrobe. From the back, she sees the woman has short, bobbed dark hair, and the same build and gait as Karin. Could it be? She might have cut her hair. To Irma’s surprise, Jutta leaps up and bounds forward, grasps desperately at the woman’s shoulders, causing her to spin.