Underground in Berlin (39 page)

Only gradually did I come to see that something else was troubling Hannchen Koch: when the war ended, so would my dependence on her. The splendid role of resistance heroine that this shy woman from humble origins had been playing for years would be over. She would be tending her garden, like the neighbours to right and left of her, and she would live without the fear of air raids, but also without any prospect of exciting events.

At that time her wishes and dreams and mine, our thinking and feeling as a whole, were diametrically opposite. I longed for the liberation that she was bound to fear. That was why Frau Koch infuriated me, and that was why she couldn’t stand my presence.

There was not only a slit trench in the large meadow opposite the Kochs’ house – it used to belong jointly to a Jewish community who had equal interests in it – but also several huts for prisoners of war and women forced labourers.
*
Most of the prisoners were Ukrainians, and they must have suffered much mistreatment. Their screams could be heard again and again, but most of the neighbours preferred not to notice. I had personal experience of the way they organised this failure to hear anything.

A hit song that was often played on the radio at the time ran ‘My Sweetheart Takes Me Sailing on a Sunday’, sung by a woman who had a good soprano voice but lisped badly. One day the windows of the nearby houses were all open to let in the early spring air, and that song rang out of living rooms from all sides. Then, however, the screams of the tortured inmates of the prison camp were also heard – and all the windows closed at the same time as if by previous agreement. No one’s sweetheart wanted to take her sailing on a Sunday any more. Those were the same people who claimed, later, not to have known any of what was going on.

Long before I arrived in Kaulsdorf, however, Emil Koch had been talking to the guards stationed at the fence of the camp. He had pointed to an old Ukrainian with a large moustache and said, ‘That old boy looks as if he could chop wood well. Can you send him over to me some time? I’m a German, I don’t have to do it for myself.’ And he had given the man on guard a couple of cigarettes. So the Ukrainian, whose name was Timofei, came over to the Kochs’ house. He didn’t speak a word of German, but they communicated somehow or other. Emil saw that he limped, and his face was distorted by pain. The Kochs got him to lie down on the sofa, took his shirt off, saw the bloody weals on his body, cooled them and gave him something to eat.

From then on Emil often gave meatballs to the guard by the camp fence; Hannchen made them from the minced meat mixture that he smuggled home from his work with the fire brigade in the wax-cloth pouches of his vest. In exchange, the guard let him have the Ukrainian, allegedly to chop wood. Timofei was so grateful that he could be prevented only with difficulty from kneeling down to kiss the Kochs’ feet. He kissed the hands of everyone in the house.

Two Polish women, Krystyna and Halina, also visited us regularly. They were forced labourers, and must have felt it was a miracle; they knew Germans only as slave-drivers, but here were friendly people who welcomed them warmly, gave them food and drink and respected them as human beings. Sometimes a French prisoner of war called Legret came visiting as well, and on occasion all four were invited at the same time. It was very cramped in the Kochs’ little living room then.

Naturally I was present at such times myself; I was part of the household, and helped to pour the ersatz coffee while Hannchen Koch served potato cakes.

One day Krystyna, who came from Krakow and had studied at a conservatory there, went over to the piano – the instrument that had come from my parents’ apartment. ‘You piano play?’ asked Frau Koch, in the way one addresses foreigners. ‘You “Chopsticks” know?’ Krystyna blushed. No, she didn’t know ‘Chopsticks’ and didn’t want to. Instead she played Mozart’s A major piano sonata. Our eyes met, and then I quickly looked away, because I didn’t want to put anyone to shame. But for a brief moment I had felt the strong bond that exists between people of culturally similar backgrounds.

What future, however, was there for poor Frau Koch, overworked and worn almost to a skeleton? She, the resistance heroine now entertaining international guests, was to go back to the wallflower existence that had once been hers.

Unfortunately, Hannchen Koch had an irrationally great and, as I saw it, totally disproportionate fear of bombs, and insisted on our going, every evening, to the bunker used as an air-raid centre in the next village but one. We couldn’t occupy the slit trench together while I was hiding in her house. With a scarf pulled well down over her eyes she set off with me, always taking care to avoid going close to houses where fanatical Nazis lived.

It was several kilometres to this bunker, and we were always in a hurry because first she had to wash the dishes, mop the floor and go round with a duster. I could have slapped her for this pedantic good housekeeping. By the time we finally left the house she was panting with exhaustion. I had to drag her along behind me, hauling and half carrying her.

The bunker had two separate entrances, but she insisted on our marching in together through the same one. Luckily, the checks at the entrance were only perfunctory; no one looked hard at my identity card with the faked photo and the other card certified by the postman, or it would have been obvious that the details given in the two identity cards were the same apart from the altered date of birth.

The whole thing was an attempt at combined murder and suicide, since Hannchen Koch didn’t want her days of heroism to come to an end. And I thought: she is cancelling out all the fine things she’s done for me. It was much the same when she invited Else Pohl for a cup of ersatz coffee. That was in the last days of the war, when the approaching sound of battle had become our constant background music.

Hannchen never usually asked women friends in; she didn’t have any. She was only on distant terms with her neighbours and her colleagues at work. Emil, however, had a few acquaintances, including Richard Pohl, Else’s husband, whom he had known since his schooldays. Else was mad about the paranormal. She devoured books on astrology, black magic and psychology, and just like Hannchen Koch had a love of anything mysterious, irrational and not subject to the dictates of reason. But she was also an avid Nazi, so you had to be careful if she came into your house. And now Hannchen Koch was inviting this of all women into hers.

‘I’ll just go into the cellar and read a book,’ was my suggestion for the duration of her visit. But for some senseless reason or other this simple solution was rejected. Hannchen had another plan; she banished me to a place only a little way from the small coffee table in the living room. The bedroom contained two beds that could be folded up lengthways, with a cleverly designed surrounding structure of my mother’s devising that acted to take lights and a bedside table. I was to get behind the curtain beside the beds, and make sure it didn’t bulge out by flattening myself against the mattresses. Hannchen insisted on leaving the connecting door between the bedroom and living room open, alleging that closed doors aroused suspicion.

Else Pohl made it clear at the beginning of her visit that she was surprised by the invitation: people really had other things on their minds just now, she said, but since Hannchen Koch had asked her so nicely she thought she’d just look in. I was about three metres away, behind the curtain, hardly daring to breathe and forbidden to clear my throat, which of course made me want to cough. The conversation between the two women was about almost nothing. Frau Koch kept saying how nice it was for the two of them to be sitting there together. Her guest made several attempts to leave, but was persuaded to stay a little longer. The whole thing was staged to torment me. I stood behind the curtain, cursing to myself: silly cow, silly cow, silly cow.

On another occasion Frau Koch had to busy herself at the smoking stove, stirring up the fire with twigs to make soup. There was no gas now. As she did so she sang, unmusically and out of tune, the line from the former Austrian national anthem, now adopted by Germany, ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ [‘God save Emperor Franz’]. She couldn’t remember any more of it, but then she began lamenting the downfall of her fatherland. This uncompromising anti-Fascist fighter who had sacrificed herself to her beliefs for twelve years was not her usual self at all.

Emil understood that and apologised to me for his wife; he forgave her everything and loved her with all her eccentricities. He himself had another problem. Before the Nazis came to power he had been a fireman, and he hoped to go back to that job after liberation. But he would have to choose the right moment to jettison his present uniform. Naturally he didn’t want to be taken prisoner by the Russians in a barracks under the command of German police. However, he mustn’t make his move so early that he might yet be reported to the field police or the Gestapo as a deserter. At just the right time he must cycle home, burn his uniform, find some old clothes to put on and then, limping a little, hope to pass muster as an old civilian. He did it, too.

A kind of no-man’s-land period of time began. The camps on the big meadow began breaking up. One day the camp guards had simply gone away. The inmates could have walked out, but they didn’t know where to go.

Then Emil said he had seen the marks of tank tracks in a woodland clearing. One tank must have arrived ahead of the others, although the Soviet army had not really reached the suburbs of Berlin yet. Emil told me where the place was, beside a small birch tree. I went there, found the tracks – and was greatly moved. I sat down calmly on the woodland floor and thought: this is a place where everything changes. This is where hope turns to confidence.

I was very glad, but not stupidly cheerful or foolish. Saying goodbye to hope was sad, too. Hope had kept me going for years. Now fulfilment of that hope lay ahead. What would it bring me?

When the war reached its very last stage, there were air-raid warnings almost continuously. I no longer hid from the neighbours. We didn’t go away to the bunker but lay in the slit trenches. I often sat there on one of the rough-and-ready benches for hours. My bones hurt. Frau Koch clung to me, and people talked a lot of stupid nonsense. In a rather foolish way, I was annoyed to see the war ending in so tediously banal a way, and finding that I was not part of the turmoil of battle.

And then the moment came. Someone said, ‘It’s over. The Russians are here. We’d better come out.’
*
They all clambered out of the trenches with their hands up. I raised mine only slightly, because I was thinking: I didn’t have to surrender. I stood formally by the side of the defeated, but my feelings were with the victors.

The Russian who faced me first was a picture-book example, a pock-marked Mongolian. I embraced him and thanked him in German for liberating us. This simple solder looked rather shocked. And I admitted to myself that I had been putting on a theatrical performance.

I was free, the war was over, the Red Army had won. I would have liked to weep for joy and relief, but I felt no emotion at all.

The Polish women from the camp stormed through all the houses, breaking china and snatching up anything they could take with them. A pack of them was ransacking our house – but Krystyna and Halina suddenly appeared, stood protectively in front of Frau Koch, and quickly spoke to their countrywomen in loud voices: resistance fighters lived here, they said, people who had done good for years to Poles as well as others, and their house should be spared.

It was like a witches’ sabbath. One of the women pulled Halina’s hair, another struck Krystyna in the face with both hands. I saw all this as if from a great distance, like a spectacle that was nothing to do with me.

Then the Soviet soldiers came into the houses. A gigantically tall and corpulent man perched one of Frau Koch’s ridiculous little hats on his head, put on the tasteless, showy plush jacket that she had made for herself and went away in it. That struck me as immensely funny. But her father howled ‘Thieves!’ out loud like a child, his mouth wide open. You bloody Nazi, I thought, you and your like voted for Hitler, you backed him when he started this war, you obeyed when you were told to hold out. And now you get upset about a silly little hat. But of course I kept my mouth shut.

Another soldier stormed into the cellar where old Guthmann did a trade breeding laboratory animals. He had trained as a purse maker, he later worked as a coal merchant and a park keeper, and now he supplemented his pension by selling white mice to the Charité hospital. He delivered the mice he had bred once a week.

I was standing by the open cellar door when the Russian saw all the cages and immediately opened them. With solemn gravity, raising his hands as if in blessing, he kept repeating the word
Ozvobožhdenie
in a singsong voice, as if conjuring up a spirit. It meant ‘liberation’, and he was performing what seemed like a childish magical act. Then he began liberating the preserved fruits from the many jars on shelves along the cellar walls. He kept solemnly saying, ‘
Ozvobožhdenie
’, as he smashed jar after jar. The mice rolling round in cherry and strawberry compote were dyed red, and I could hardly contain my laughter. But Hannchen’s father was howling and shouting out loud. I felt like smashing my fist into his face.

The bad part was that the Soviet soldiers also rampaged through the houses raping women. Naturally I was among them. I slept in the attic, where I was visited that night by a sturdy, friendly character called Ivan Dedoborez. I didn’t mind too much. Afterwards he wrote a note in pencil and left it on my door: this was his fiancée in here, it said, and everyone else was to leave her alone. In fact after that no one else did pester me.

I heard from the floor below hysterical screaming and screeching: they had got to Frau Koch as well. Looking out of the window a little later, I saw a tall, slender and dazzlingly handsome man of Mediterranean appearance leaving the house. This Soviet soldier was clearly high-ranking, probably even an officer.