Necessary Lies (23 page)

Anna reads another of Ursula's articles:
The summer of 1938 moved fast. Magda Goebbels watched her husband change his cream coloured silk shirts twice a day, dress in white suits, soft rimmed hats and go on the prowl. “Thirty-six actresses, a number of secretaries and wives of lesser officials” Karl Hanke said. “Bock von Babelsberg. A ram of the film city. It used to be that an actress had to sleep with Jewish producers to get parts in films. Is the Minister of Propaganda no better than a Jew? Are we really no different from them, Frau Goebbels?”

She listened.

“He says he is in love and he wants to leave you, the children, and the Führer. Leave Germany for a Czech actress with Slavic cheekbones and a swooning voice. Leave his German wife, for this Lidushka, the woman he shamelessly parades with everywhere. At the Nuremberg party rally, he kissed her just before it was time to go to the marble dais on the Zeppelin field, and she had to wipe her lipstick from his lips. ‘Look at me?' he said. ‘I'll be speaking to you only.' She sat in the front row, below the stage, watching him turn toward her and bring her handkerchief to his lips.

“Here it is, Frau Goebbels, all the evidence. Copies of his letters, bills for flowers, a stack of love notes. A complete list of all his liaisons. “I cannot look at how your husband treats you and not rage.

“This Czech whore, Frau Goebbels. Every day she is in the street, in front of the ministry, so that he may see her when he looks out of the window. He is at her apartment every evening.

“You, a woman of such beauty, such distinction. The woman I love.”

Karl Hanke, her husband's aide, his state secretary.

“He is my husband's vassal,” she thought at first, embarrassed by his love. “Awkward. Unpolished,” she said to her friends. “He thinks I need to be saved! Imagines himself to be some kind of a knight.” Then she asked the Führer for divorce.

“Give your husband one year,” Hitler said. “One more year. If you ask me again, I'll agree.”

Ordered by his Führer to mend his ways, Joseph Goebbels set out to work. There were no more actresses and no more lady friends. Or, if there were, even Hanke could not find the slightest evidence of their presence. There were flowers for Magda. Gifts for the children. “Hanke is not the man for you, my dear Magda,” Goebbels said to her once, across the dinner table. “You don't need me to tell you that. We belong together, don't we?”

The reconciliation agreement was drawn up in detail and approved by both sides. Among Magda's conditions was the future of Karl Hanke, her disappointed knight. He was to become the Gauleiter of Silesia and take up residence at the Castle of Breslau.

She saw him once more, in 1944, when she came to a Breslau clinic for an operation. She was driven along the boulevards of the city. “We are safe here, working hard for the Reich,” Hanke said, proudly, pointing to new factories attracted by the calm of the hinterland. But the refugees from the east were already swelling the streets, crowding in Breslau apartments, waiting. “This city has sworn its loyalty to the Führer,” Hanke whispered to her. “If the Russians ever come here, they will find nothing but a heap of smouldering ruins.”

In the Führer's headquarters the radio carried the last speech of Gauleiter Hanke from besieged Festung Breslau. “We who have promised to die for our Führer will not back away from our promise. We shall turn our fortress into a mass grave for the Soviet hordes.” Even Dr. Goebbels was generous with applause: “If all our Gauleiters in the East were like this and acted like
Hanke, we should be in better shape than we are,” he wrote in his diary. But the greatest reward came in the Führer's last will; Gauleiter Karl Hanke replaced Himmler as the Reichsführer-SS, and Chef der Deutschen Polizei.

“Our glorious ideals of Nazism have been destroyed and with them everything in my life that has been beautiful, admirable, noble and good,” Magda Goebbels wrote in her last letter to her oldest son, a prisoner of war in far away Canada. “Yesterday evening, the Führer unpinned his gold Party badge and fastened it to my jacket. I am proud and happy. May God give me the strength to do my last, most difficult duty.... The world that will come after the Führer and the defeat of National Socialism is not worth living in. That's why I am taking the children with me. They are too good for the coming world, and God will understand me, when I bring them their deliverance.... Harold, my dear child, I bequeath to you the best thing that I ever learned from life — be true, true to yourself, true to others, true to your own country, in every way, always, in everything.”

Of the children only Helga suspected something and did not want to drink the tea. She alone had bruises on her body, the only signs of struggle. The other children went to sleep peacefully, and Magda poured cyanide into their throats, emerging out of the bedroom after each death to take a deep breath and a drag of a cigarette. A few hours later, pale but composed she walked with her husband to the yard of the Chancellery and swallowed her own “capsule of happiness.” Her body, doused with petrol, smouldered for a while, but the swastika in her lapel was not touched by the flames.

The names of the children all started with H. Hedda, Heide, Helga, Helmut, Hilda, Holde.

On May 6
^th
1945, a single engine plane left the newly constructed airstrip behind the Kaiserbrücke in Breslau, the city below exploding, street by street. Karl Hanke, reports say, was killed by Czech partisans a few weeks later.

The train from Warsaw to Wroclaw is slowing down again. It was in no hurry to begin with, the wheels hitting the rails
leisurely, moaning when the train-cars were pulled out of their inertia, forced into movement. Perhaps, if she closed her eyes, the rattling of metal against metal would quiet her thoughts, put her into a shallow sleep.
What a moving story of motherly love!
Ursula has scribbled across the margins.
And all these Breslau touches! Perfect for you, my love, as you wallow in self-pity, isn't it? Should give you some consolation.

The day is sunny and quite warm but there is a cool draught of air coming through the door that won't close. Anna picks up a sweater and covers her shoulders. This is not the way to return, alone, unsure of forgiveness, chased by the words of another woman. The train picks up speed only to slow down again.

Anna travelled in such trains many times in her childhood. Long train journeys marked the beginnings and ends of all her summers, two leisurely months spent in a rented room at the seaside, away from the hot and dusty city. “To breathe in iodine from the sea,”
Babcia
said, hoping that this year, unlike all the previous ones, the cure will work and Anna will not fall sick. Anna remembers staring at the plume of smoke from the steam engine and the loud, long whistles cutting into the sleepy rattle of wheels, making her sit up and ask for a drink out of a red thermos bottle full of sweet, lemony tea.

There were always people around, pushing, coughing, clearing their throats, swearing. The throngs of people at the stations, storming the trains, rushing in to grab their seats. Young men with hard suitcases rammed their way through the crowds. “Taken,” they yelled, when
Mama
pushed Anna and her brother past closed compartments where those who managed to get in spread their hands on the empty seats, saving them for their own families.

There was never enough room, but
Mama
always managed to get a seat for them, always found the way, spotting young, strong soldiers travelling alone, smiling at their clean-shaven faces long before the train rolled into the platform, holding Anna and Yan up, their plump innocence and her flattery securing their protection. What words she used Anna does not remember, but she remembers being lifted up into the air and carried — “like a princess” her mother would later say — right
above the heads of the crowd into a seat by the window. She remembers the touch of green woollen fabric of the soldier's uniform against her cheek, rough and prickly, and her mother settling comfortably right next to her, her face beaming.
Babcia
is slowly crossing herself, muttering a short prayer to the Virgin Mary to take care of them on this journey. Pulling out sandwiches from her big shoulder bag, hard-boiled eggs, red apples peeled and cut into thin wedges. Giving Anna a brown paper bag full of sweet cookies and asking, in a whisper, to offer them first to these nice young men who helped them, and then to everyone else.

Among all this, there is never a memory of her father who stayed behind in the city, and who, as always, would join them later when they were already settled in their one-room lodgings in a seaside village, Ustka or Leba, where
Babcia
would make a shade out of an old newspaper to cover a naked bulb, and where Anna and Yan would sleep in one bed, on a prickly straw mattress, smelling of the fields.

Now Anna is grateful for the unhurried pace of the wheels, grateful for the few hours of time. The train is almost empty and, in Warsaw, she passed a number of compartments before choosing this one. When she called her brother from Warsaw and told him she would take a train, Yan asked her to make sure not to be alone in a compartment. It was not even a warning, just a reminder, necessary only because she was coming from her soft and protected life in Canada.

On the train no one speaks to her, no one shows any interest in her affairs. After a short “good morning” followed by a quick look at her black leather coat, the young woman opposite her, whose pale and narrow face is carefully made up, resumes reading colourful magazines.
Your Style, Success —
Anna can make out the glossy titles.

The woman has taken off her high heels and has put on a pair of fuzzy, pink slippers. The two young men, who, without being asked, briskly helped Anna put her bag and suitcases on the metal shelf above their heads, do not start a conversation either. They both wear grey sweaters and corduroy pants, are slightly overweight and pale, and talk about business in low,
quiet voices. “Someone dunked a lot of money in sugar,” Anna hears. Someone else had great plans but sank in the Russian markets. The KGB is into business debt collecting now. For a mere five percent. The idioms are easy to figure out, but they no longer sound familiar. Anna is glad they do not pay attention to her. She would rather be invisible.

The conductor who comes by to check their tickets assures her that the train will be in Wroclaw on time. Anna half-expects him to say something like, “Thank you and have a nice journey,” but this is asking for too much, too soon. She should be satisfied with a smile.

Wroclaw, Breslau. When Anna was growing up just pronouncing the word Breslau made the children uneasy, as if recalling a secret, silenced but still dangerous. A Polish city without the past. A Polish city filled with German ruins.

Footpaths led into these ruins, she remembers. Paths weaving like trails through mountains, up and down, over precipices and valleys, through the mysterious caverns of half-buried cellars and low concrete bunkers, smelling of rot and wet, crumbling plaster. They played there, all the children in the street, and she remembers the tightening of muscles, a contraction between her legs, the anticipation of the unexpected. They were warned that people could still vanish here, told that not so long ago a walk in these streets after dark was a death sentence. That the nights in Wroclaw belonged to prowlers, hot on the trail of anything that could be stolen or robbed. That in the mornings, corpses stripped of clothes were found among broken bricks.

The children who went into the ruins alone were asking for trouble; among the debris, no one would hear their screams. Warned so often, they walked alert, ready to run away. “Vampires” and “werewolves,” they whispered in the dark, recalling their parents' words. The boys knew the routes to old bunkers and cellars. In the dark they whispered about German spies they had seen, and one of them would always try to frighten the rest with a scream. Sniffing the moist, mouldy air of the bunkers, they searched for German
schmeissers
or Russian
kalashnikovs,
for steel bullets that could be polished with a piece of cloth until they shone.

It was from these trips that they brought back German coins, lapels with SS runes, blue, red and purple stamps with swastikas or Hitler's moustached face, rusted helmets filled with slime and rotting leaves. In the evening dusk, they hit the granite pavements with steel bayonets setting off blue sparks, or plunged the sharp steel tips between the stones, lifting the granite cubes from sidewalks and rolling them down the street.

Anna remembers standing by the living room window, counting the huge trucks, roaring below in the street, carrying the rubble away. Sometimes twenty or thirty passed in the morning. “Good riddance,”
Mama
sighed with relief, thinking of mines, of unexploded bombs.

Yes, her mother was pleased when the burnt out façades of the buildings were pulled down. Pleased when the giant statue of Frederick Wilhelm I was pulled from his horse and smashed to the ground. When Frederick Wilhelm III gave room to the Polish playwright, Alexander Fredro. When
Strasse der SA
became the Street of Silesian Resistance Fighters, and
Kaiserbrücke,
the Grunwaldski Bridge. When the bricks from German ruins, cleaned and sorted, were taken away to rebuild Stalingrad and then the Old Town in the heart of burnt-out Warsaw.

Returned to motherland,
the slogans of her childhood said in big red letters. Slogans spread on thick, concrete pillars, on white billboards. Slogans perched on the roofs of houses, on the bays of bridges, their red and white background flashing in store windows.
We haven't come here, we have returned.
Returned to the ancient Piast capital of Lower Silesia which, too, was a Polish province. To think otherwise would have been a betrayal.