Clara (33 page)

IN RUSSIA
Albert had been in command of a division that shrank from nine hundred tanks to just sixty-five. There was one battle, he told her one day long afterwards, one single battle that alone had cost the Germans some three hundred thousand dead and wounded. There were no words to describe the fighting, he’d said to her. Biblical proportions. He’d seen none like it before. Even if you survived it, it murdered your soul. People went crazy on both sides. They climbed out of tanks and ran and were shot down.

The Russian
T
34 tank had better armour and bigger guns, he said. And the waves of men that surged behind them were endless. Soldiers as far as you could see. Then came Kursk, which was even worse, and Stalingrad was worse still with maybe eight hundred fifty thousand dead all told. You cannot imagine, he’d said.

In January 1945, he was replaced in Russia by an eager Waffen-SS colonel. Because of his alpine experience, he was sent to Italy to command an infantry division in the Apennines that was battling the U.S. 10th Mountain Division. He had not yet reached his destination when the SS colonel who’d replaced him was already dead, shot by a sniper.

That spring in Italy, Albert’s division fought American, British, Canadian, and Polish troops, and Italian partisans. The Germans were on the run, he said. The Allies had more airplanes, artillery, tanks, and troops than he had ever thought possible. And his men, while they had machine guns capable of firing nine hundred rounds per minute, were by then counting their shells.

Albert summoned Guido Malfatti, the boy on his peg leg, and he gave him some letters for her and a few supplies. He made out a
Laissez Passer
and a request for transportation, and he sent him north toward Austria.

On April 19, 1945, when the situation had become hopeless for his unit, he took it upon himself to sign honourable discharge papers for his commanders, who then did the same for their men. He shook the hands of his officers, and that evening he was taken prisoner by a young captain from the U.S. 5th Army. The captain climbed down from the jeep, saluted, and said what he had to say. Behind him two soldiers were at the Browning machine gun on its post in the jeep, and the windshield lay folded forward for clear fire.

Two days previously Albert had been injured in his left thigh, and at an American field hospital they looked to the wound, bandaged him up, and returned him to his captor.

On April 29, 1945, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff signed the articles of surrender, and the war in Italy was over. By then Albert was in a vast pow pen near Bolzano, he and several thousand officers and men.

IN VIENNA
Peter had somehow made his way home from Romania. He’d received two field promotions and was a captain now. But he’d taken a grenade fragment in the arm, and it had shattered the bone and torn out muscle. They’d patched him up and, with his arm in a sling, he fled the camp on a truck going west and he kept going, showing written orders he’d issued himself. By the time he reached the apartment in Vienna he was delirious.

His beloved Daniela was there; she had been there most of the war, waiting for him, somehow surviving the bombs and the shortages. Part of the building was gone, and with it the bedroom wall of her flat. She put him in her bed on the living-room couch, and then ran through the streets to find Erika and to plead with her to send a nurse. Daniela told her all this later, how they’d driven through the ruined city in Mitzi’s little car, the three of them: Daniela, Erika, and the nurse in her blue coat and white cap with the small red cross in front.

The nurse swabbed the malodorous wound with iodine and she sprinkled Salvarsan powder. She applied
a fresh bandage. Peter had lost consciousness.

“Water,” said the nurse. “When he wakes up. We don’t want his kidneys to fail. Sugar, if you have any. Dissolve it in warm water for the glucose in it. About the infection, we’ll just have to wait. Maybe we can catch it.”

For the next six nights, Daniela slept on the floor by the couch, curled up there on a blanket like a faithful dog. During the day she sat for hours with his head in her lap, wiping his brow and spoon-feeding him a broth she’d made on her camping stove with potatoes and tomatoes from her corner patch in the garden.

On the credenza stood a copy of that picture of him as a young man on his laughing horse, in his uniform at the end of the First World War. Proud and dashing. His lieutenant’s star, the braid, the lanyard, the sabre.

Peter died the day the Russians took Vienna. Not that there was much left to take. The city lay in ruins and there were no soldiers, no defences, hardly any men. The shelling and the bombing was over, but the raping and casual murdering by Russian soldiers was only just beginning, and it increased and multiplied as if becoming crazed on its own scent and its absolute and triumphant lawlessness. To get rid of the bodies, mass graves were dug all over the city and people carted their dead there and dumped them. Lime was shovelled on them in white and dusty layers.

“Rats this big,” said Daniela and held out her hands to show her. “They tunnelled among the dead. And dogs running mad-eyed and snarling in the streets.”

Daniela spent two days in the apartment with Peter dead on the couch. Against the smell she said she sprinkled kerosene on a handkerchief and held that to her nose. But no mass grave for him, she had decided, and so during the second night she rolled him into a rug and dragged him down flights of stairs in the dark. She hoisted him crosswise onto a wheelbarrow and pushed him to the place she had chosen in daylight, a small park around a few corners from the apartment, the flowerbeds full of soft soil. She dug a hole there and she rolled him into it, and covered him up and tamped down the soil to discourage the dogs.

She would go there often during the next few years to plant flowers or just sit in the grass and read or smoke a cigarette.

Ten years later when the Russian occupation finally ended, she had his remains dug up. She put his bones in a bag and brought them on the train to St. Töllden. The stonemason made a small box of slate for them, and Daniela borrowed a shovel and dug a hole in the ground in the monarchist grave with the plumed helmet.

There was no official memorial service at the chapel that day, just Daniela, Mitzi, and Clara. They lit a candle and sat remembering. No incense for him, no old words in Latin, but a funeral just the same.

WITHIN A MONTH
after the Russian invasion of Vienna, the war in Europe was over. The Allies had come from three sides and met in the middle, and the Nuremberg
documents and depositions from survivors made accurate and shocking pictures of what happened then.

She sat reading them in that research room partitioned off at the warehouse with the oiled floor and the plywood walls, sat for days at the desk as if in a trance, walked to the hotel to sleep, and came back the next morning. Each time they checked her personal identification and the documents issued by Dr. Hufnagel under the distinctive blue United Nations letterhead.

Some days there were American and British journalists in that research room with her, but most days it was just her and a younger woman. Her name was Faith Stinson, and she was a postgraduate student from Cambridge University, a redhead with freckles and a bright, spontaneous smile.

“The only reason they’re letting me in here,” said Miss Stinson, “is that my father is a colonel and he was on some of the panels. He fought in Italy.” She was working on a degree in political science, she said. Something on the self-destructive nature of dictatorships. The other big topic was Communism. But there were too many people doing work on that already, she said.

“Communism is back?”

“Well,” said Miss Stinson. “Socialism, kind of. Embracing the common fate of humanity. Helping those who cannot help themselves. Welfare. All that.”

They read in silence. They moved papers and made notes.

“And you?” said Miss Stinson on another day.

“I’m doing research for one of the UN archives, the Human Rights section in New York. What used to be the League of Nations.”

“Interesting. On what exactly?”

They were just the two of them in the room that day, with the door closed to the photocopy room and the counter with index files, long metal boxes one after the other. There was an elderly female clerk with rhinestone glasses in there who did the copying at the light table and the actual search in the stacks.

“Specific topics,” she said. “They want abstracts, condensed seven-page versions of a topic. Like the July coup, or the end in the bunker. Or denazification.”

“I’ve done the July coup,” said Miss Stinson. “The bomb and the aftermath. All those generals. Rommel slumped dead in the front seat of his car, with his cap slipped into his face. My father says he would have liked to know him.”

“Many would. But forget that image, him dead from poison. I can give you better ways to see him.”

And over soup and sandwich in a place just up the street she told Miss Stinson about that dinner after the horse race so long ago. She described Rommel raising his glass to horses and humans, and his calm face across the table, studying her.

“My God,” said Miss Stinson. “You go back to all that? That’s so interesting. Tell me more.”

“Some day, perhaps.”

Back at the document warehouse, once they were past
the security checks and back at their desks in the research room, Miss Stinson said, “But it’s also such dark and terrible stuff. Don’t you think? I’m just doing the bunker file. How they all killed themselves. Shot, poisoned. Can you explain the dead Goebbels children? The marks on the older girl’s face.”

“No. There is no explaining those things. An explanation would come close to a justification, but there must never be one. We can try to reconstruct their thinking with mythology and madness, but do we need to?”

“And him and Eva Braun in the end. And she, just married.”

“Yes. I’ve done that box.”

To ashes!
Hitler had ordered.
Not one bone left of me! Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing
.

The fate of Mussolini and his mistress had terrified Hitler, strung up by their heels and spat at in death, so utterly despised that he had ordered his chauffeur to have enough gasoline on hand to burn their bodies beyond recognition.

And on the last day, while all the country was on fire, SS on Himmler’s orders went through the many Gestapo cells in Berlin and shot dead every last person in them, a thousand and more civilians vaguely accused of words or actions not in the interest of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, seventy-five million and more dead. Among them millions of Jews
across Europe, and in the end by Red Cross and League of Nations estimates easily twice as many civilians as soldiers.

In some ways for women and children the first years of peace were worse than the war had been. Allied Command had issued a directive that the entire civilian population should be made to feel guilty not just for the war but for Nazi atrocities as well. It was called
The Doctrine of Collective Guilt
, and posters were printed and displayed everywhere of the death camps that read,
You Are Guilty of This! These Atrocities: Your Fault!

Women and children were at gunpoint marched through death camps, and one day in September 1945 Erika and Daniela on trucks with many others were carted east by Russian soldiers to an SS Einsatzgruppen death pit and forced to drag up the dead and lay them out for viewing, and then to take them down again and bury them.

But among those accused and caught in the net of retribution were also most of the actual criminals that had thrived in Hitler’s shadow, and most of them were hanged.

“You’ve seen this one?” said Miss Stinson one day at her desk. “It should be cross-referenced in the Generals’ Plot file. I don’t think it is.”

“What?”

It was a page on the fate of General Fromm, the one weak link and traitor among the plotting generals. It turned out that even though he had tried desperately to show loyalty to Hitler by having Colonel Stauffenberg
shot, the Gestapo arrested him too. They tortured him and tried him before a mock People’s Court, and then hanged him at Brandenburg prison on March 19, 1945.
Hanged by the neck until dead
, the document said.

Faith Stinson had been finished with her work one week before her. The day she left to take the train to Frankfurt and then from there to fly back to England, Clara had walked with her to the guard house at the main gate. They hugged.

“Maybe I’ll do something on Communism after all,” said Miss Stinson. “Socialism as the new hope. Human kindness. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh, I do.”

Miss Stinson stepped back and studied her face. “You mean it?”

“I do. Hope of any kind. Old, new.”

Miss Stinson wore a trenchcoat and a fashionable black beret that day. Her lips were full and red, and she looked young and lovely. “Keep in touch,” she said. “Come and visit. We have a big house with peacocks in the garden. And quince bushes. Do you like quince jelly?”

“I’ve never tasted it. You have my address.”

She had stood hugging her arms because she felt cold even though it was June. Miss Stinson had rolled down the window and smiled and waved as the taxi drove away.

She waved back, then stood, missing her children.