The Other Side of Love (51 page)

“Vanished…”

she quavered. In 1941, Hitler issued a decree poetically named Nacht und Nebel

“night and fog’. Prisoners could disappear without a trace, as it were into the dark fog.

“He’s dead,”

said the Untersturmfuhrer.

“Who?”

She began to tremble.

“Erich?”

“Is that what you call him? The uncle’s kaput, too, so there’s no point trying to keep their secrets.”

“You’re talking about my brother … ?”

“Who else? Officially, he died defending the Fatherland on the Ukrainian Front, but just between us he croaked during an interrogation. PrinzAlbrechtstrasse is enthusiastic about ferreting out traitors.”

The eyes shone yet brighter, as if lit by inner rays.

“He and the one-eyed uncle were both in on that cowardly attempt to take the Fiihrer’s life last July. Oh, don’t look so innocent. This isn’t coming as any surprise.”

Croaked during an interrogation … Sigi, oh, Sigi. From the note on flimsy toilet paper she expected her brother’s death, yet foreknowledge couldn’t stem her involuntary outburst of grief. Standing before the SS gimlet-eyed interrogator, she bent her head into her hands, gasping and sobbing.

“Control yourself,”

the Untersturmfuhrer said coldly.

“I want the names of other traitors. You will give me names.”

Suddenly the air-raid alarm blared. The guard prodded her hastily back to her cell, handcuffing her to the iron ring in the wall, locking the door. His footsteps raced swiftly down the hall.

She never again saw the fanatic-eyed SS-Untersturmfiihrer, nor was she interrogated. The fourteen-year-old SS guard whispered that many of the officers had been transferred to defend Danzig against the Russians.

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After a couple of weeks she was shoved into a van and driven to a village railway station. Here, an unhitched boxcar was pushed into a siding. Inside, twenty men and three women were locked into individual cages like those used for transporting pet animals, cages too small for even a young child to stand. When the other prisoners learned she was Siegfried von Hohenau’s sister, they welcomed her - everyone here either had conspired to usurp Hitler in the July plot or was related to a conspirator. They were en route to a concentrationcamp, whichever camp remained in the shrunken Third Reich. Military trains and hospital trains chugged by in both directions, but the prison-car remained in the siding. The guards, Hungarians wearing faded bluejackets like the railway workers, spoke no German. Mornings and evenings they unlocked the prisoners in turn for

“exercise”

-first the men, then the women: when it was Kathe’s turn to squat, they stared at her. The guards, like the thunder of artillery, became a condition of life. Then, from far away in the east, came a weird howling screech.

“Katyushas,”

pronounced a bald Wehrmacht major.

“The men call them Stalin’s pipe organs. The Russians fire their rockets from multibarrelled launchers.”

Despite the persistent pain of being cramped in her cage, Kathe felt transformed by being with others in similar circumstances. Talking to them, she sometimes for long minutes forgot her impending fate, forgot her grief for Sigi, her anxieties about her mother - and Erich. Each captive supplied scraps of information; it was as though they were making a pot-luck stew. From th fcimmering kettle emerged the significant news that the Ruhr had R llapsed, that the Russians were at the Oder river, that Germany had been compressed into a small hour-glass.

The oldest woman, a deeply religious octogenarian, summed it up in her own way.

“The Lord is marking an end to the war.”

“Not soon enough for us, Grafin,”

sighed a narrow-faced colonel who wore the maroon stripe of the General Staff.

“The war won’t end soon enough to save us.”

On their fourth day, a closed cattle-train rumbled by. Atop the roof of each car two SS troopers wearing the death’s-head Einsatzgruppen insignia kneeled with machineguns. A hideously foul odour spread, and above the sound of wheels could be heard a thin wailing hum.

Long after the train had passed nobody spoke, then a Luftwaffe major said quietly:

“Jews. Being evacuated to other camps. Can you make any sense of it? The Reich’s shrivelled to nothing, the war’s ovei any day now, and still those swine keep shipping away the Poor bastards.”

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‘We Germans have a lot to answer for,”

said the grafin.

“They’re doing it,”

voices clamoured.

“Them. Hitler’s pigs.”

“We allowed it,”

Kathe said.

And the grafin added in a quavery tone that rang through the boxcar:

“In the hour of judgement, each of us will have to answer for it to God.”

On the fifth day, Kathe and the other female prisoners were taken into the small station. With gestures the Hungarian guards indicated they should strip, all of them, even the aged grafin. None of the women made a move. The guards jerked Kathe to the table, yanking off her clothes. Thrusting her face-down and naked on the varnished oak of the table, they took turns beating her with their truncheons. She tried not to give them the satisfaction of hearing her scream, but when the blows landed on open wounds she could no longer stifle her grunting whimpers. She was jerked to her feet. Torn clothes were thrust at her and she was shoved from the station.

Stamping into her shoes, she pulled on her coat. She bled copiously into the lining as she raced along the narrow street.

The nervy beat of machineguns rattled behind her. She clapped a hand to her heart. Her companions of the past few days were being massacred.

Why had she been let go?

Was it because she was young and blonde?

Or was it haphazard chance? She ran faster.

At the brink of exhaustion, she reached the farmhouse. Her tentative tap was answered by an old woman with a face as wrinkled as an apple left over from the previous year.

“Don’t tell me where you came from. I don’t want to know,”

she said.

“Come in the kitchen.”

The old woman drew water from the well to fill the bath; cold, of course - there was no fuel for heating bathwater. Kathe started to take off her coat, then swayed at the agony. The old woman eased fabric from the coagulating blood and purple-black bruises, then helped Kathe into the wooden tub.

“There’ll be scars,”

she mumbled sympathetically. The water turned rusty. Afterwards the old woman daubed Kathe’s back with a soothing concoction that smelt of mint and exchanged the coat for a clean if hideous outfit.

“Get to the Americans quick,”

she advised.

“My little boy is near Frankfurt. Erich.”

How wonderful to say the name aloud.

“Erich’s not far from Frankfurt am Main.”

“That’s good. The Amis are in Frankfurt.”

“First I must get my mother.”

“Where is she?”

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‘Berlin.”

“Berlin! Are you out of your mind? Maybe the Russians are already in Berlin. They tear the pants off anything female. A pretty, skinny little thing like you with the Ivans going at her?”

She made a coarse pumping gesture with her freckled, veined fist.

“Pah! You’ll never survive. Forget Berlin.”

IV

The bombers no longer wove above Berlin. Now barrage after barrage of Russian artillery shells keened and shrieked down, spreading terror and death impartially across the capital’s three hundred and fifty square miles. Katyushas added their otherworldly howl to the destruction.

In Potsdammerstrasse, Kathe was ordered into the public shelter. Wavery candlelight illuminated hell. People sprawled everywhere, not an inch of space left. There was no food. There were no ventilators. Running water was a luxury of the past. To reach the foul non-functioning toilets Kathe had to climb over dead and living bodies. Hungry children wailed. Women clutched their comatose babies. A group of nuns prayed softly; but Kathe, dizzy with starvation and half-crazed by the crash of Russian mortars and shriek of rockets, doubted that God could hear them. Badges, Volksturm armbands and uniforms were being burned. Two men discussed with loud frankness that now was the time to get rid of Hitler. A madman wearing a black uniform silenced the conversation by firing a pistol into the air and screaming that if all the Volk remained loyal the Fiihrer would work a miracle and bring victory to the Reich. Astonishingly, there were nods of agreedfent.

can’t stay here. I must find Mother.

It was dark when Kathe left the shelter, winding her way towards the Griinewald. Fires blazed everywhere. A mob was crowding into a grocery shop. Kathe, ravenous, joined them. There was nothing left on the shelves. As they left, shells raked the street and within seconds razor-sharp shrapnel had decimated the looters. Again, randomly, she escaped.

When she reached the Grunewald, a weird half-quiet prevailed. The long line of Katyusha launching-sites in the forest had fallen silent, as f nu? mortars but capricious rifle-fire rattled from the direction ot Dahlem. Fires smouldered along her street.

w ,T house was not burning, but had been hit again. Nothing

lilT 11 ~XCept the WaUs °f tne living-room, the chimneys rising

, a neadstones. Moving down to the garage, which appeared

naamaged, Kathe slowed. Fixed to the door was the Gestapo seal.

heart made a strange lubb-lubb sound as she forced the lock. The

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odour of corruption rushed out. Sleek rats scurried, one halting to rise up and stare insolently. She moved slowly inside, and a thin involuntary wail escaped her as she saw what remained of her mother. Her chest a cold bar of pain, she wrapped a quilt around the gnawed skeleton.

A bomb had landed near the two small oaks, and the earth was soft, so she decided on it as a grave-site, but weak from fatigue and hunger she took until mid-afternoon to dig properly deep.

Clothilde von Graetz Kingsmith, descendant of Teutonic Knights, a woman who rigidly adhered to her own code of honour, became one more of the millions consigned to the uncaring earth during the twelve-year Nazi night.

am the resurrection and the life, Kathe thought as she shovelled back the dirt. And whosoever believeth in me shall never die.

She was cutting pale aphid-eaten roses, early blossoms, from her father’s derelict garden when the car racketed along the street. Only then did she realize that for hours there had been no rifle-fire.

Instinctively she used animal camouflage, standing absolutely still, scissors in her right hand, thorns biting into her left palm. But someone in the car must have spotted her. Tyres screeched, and after a few seconds two men strolled along the drive with rifles held casually under their arms. Ammunition-belts were slung around their shoulders, and they wore filthy brown uniforms with the trousers gathered like bloomers into their mud-caked low boots. Their caps bore red stars. Russians. Catching sight of her, they laughed, poking each other and calling out something to the car. Two more comrades appeared.

The one with the bottle inconsequentially she noticed it was Liebfraumikh - held it out, then brought it towards his body, an unmistakable gesture for her to approach.

“Komm Frau,”

he called. A phrase that would become familiar to her in the next few days.

There was no way to escape, yet flight was as automatic as her earlier stillness. She had reached the untended leaf-strewn terrace when the Russians caught up. The tallest one was young, maybe seventeen, with pimples along his jaw and a scraggly reddish moustache. As he reached out for her, she stabbed the closed scissors at his chest pocket. He dodged the point. The others laughed, and he grabbed Kathe’s arm, squeezing the wrist until the scissors clattered on stone, then aimed a casual boot at her stomach. The roses scattered as she toppled backwards on to the stone terrace. Her head hit so hard that lightning streaked behind her eyelids.

The red-moustached boy was already unbuttoning his trousers. She tried to get up, but the other soldiers spreadeagled her on the cold stone. She continued to twist feebly. The Russians laughed,

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obviously amused by her struggles, yet without malice. It was as if, after battling their way into the heart of Berlin, they perceived the city as a giant circus of women, liquor, booty spread out for their enjoyment. Kathe’s skirt was pulled up, and with a sharp tearing sound her pants were torn.

At the pain, she gritted her back teeth.

It was dark before they had finished with her. Battered, her eyes swollen to slits, she heard another Russian phrase that would become familiar.

“Voyna kaput.”

It meant

“The war is ended’.

Now I can go to Frankfurt, she thought.

y

Uprooted families, wounded soldiers, emaciated concentrationcamp survivors and ragged conscripted labourers trudged in every direction through farmland and woods, all nationalities attempting to avoid the Russian road-barriers and sentries that blocked the route to the American Zone. Rathe smeared mud on her face and into her hair to appear as ugly as possible. Weaving along lightheadedly, she traded possessions from the garage for food. Once she stole currants from a kitchen garden, wolfing down the unripe berries then vomiting. She wept at unexpected times for Sigi and Clothilde. All that kept her moving these terrible first weeks of peace was the hope of finding her son.