A Man Without Breath (2 page)

The judges – they were nearly all judges – who worked for the Bureau were not hypocrites any more than they were Nazis, and they saw no reason why their moral standards should decline just because the government of Germany had no moral standards at all. The Greeks certainly had a word for that all right, and I even knew what it was, although it’s fair to say I’d had to learn how to spell it again. They called that kind of behaviour ethics, and my being concerned with rightness and wrongness felt good, since it helped to restore in me a sense of pride in who and what I was. At least for a while, anyway.

Most of the time I assisted the Bureau’s judges – several of whom I’d known during the Weimar Republic – in taking depositions from witnesses or finding new cases for the Bureau to investigate. That was how I first met Siv Meyer. She was a
friend of a girl called Renata Matter, who was a good friend of mine and who worked at the Adlon Hotel. Siv played the piano in the orchestra at the Adlon.

I met her at the hotel on Sunday February 28th, which was the day after Berlin’s last Jews – some ten thousand people – had been arrested for deportation to ghettoes in the East. Franz Meyer was a worker at the Osram electric light-bulb factory in Wilmersdorf, which was where he was arrested, but before this he had been a doctor, and this was how he came to find himself working as a medical orderly on a German hospital ship that had been attacked and sunk by a British submarine off the coast of Norway in August 1941. My boss and the Bureau chief, Johannes Goldsche, had tried to investigate the case, but at the time it was thought that there had been no survivors. So when Renata Matter told me about Franz Meyer’s story, I went to see his wife at their apartment in Lützowerstrasse.

It was a short walk from my own apartment on Fasanenstrasse, with a view of the canal and the local town hall, and only a short walk from the Schulstrasse synagogue where many of Berlin’s Jews had been held in transit on their way to an unknown fate in the East. Meyer had only escaped arrest himself because he was a
Mischehe
 – a Jew who was married to a German.

From the wedding photograph on the Biedermeier sideboard it was easy to see what they saw in each other. Franz Meyer was absurdly handsome and very like Franchot Tone, the movie actor who was once married to Joan Crawford. Siv was just beautiful, and there’s nothing absurd about that; more importantly so were her three sisters, Klara, Frieda and Hedwig, all of whom were present when I met their sister for the first time.

‘Why didn’t your husband come forward before?’ I asked Siv Meyer over a cup of ersatz coffee, which was the only kind of coffee anyone had now. ‘This incident took place on August 30th 1941. Why is he only willing to speak about it now?’

‘Clearly you don’t know very much about what it’s like to be a Jew in Berlin,’ she said.

‘You’re right. I don’t.’

‘No Jew wants to draw attention to himself by being a part of any inquiry in Germany. Even if it is a good cause.’

I shrugged. ‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘A witness for the Bureau one day and a prisoner of the Gestapo the next. On the other hand I do know what it’s like to be a Jew in the East, and if you want to prevent your husband from ending up there I hope you’re telling the truth about all this. At the War Crimes Bureau we get lots of people who try to waste our time.’

‘You were in the East?’

‘Minsk,’ I said, simply. ‘They sent me back here to Berlin and the War Crimes Bureau for questioning my orders.’

‘What’s happening out there? In the ghettoes? In the concentration camps? One hears so many different stories about what resettlement amounts to.’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t think the stories even get close to the horror of what’s happening in the eastern ghettoes. And by the way, there is no resettlement. There’s just starvation and death.’

Siv Meyer let out a sigh and then exchanged a glance with her sisters. I was fond of looking at her three sisters myself. It made a very pleasant change to take a deposition from an attractive and well-spoken woman instead of an injured soldier.

‘Thank you for being honest, Herr Gunther,’ she said. ‘As
well as the stories one hears so many lies.’ She nodded. ‘Since you’ve been so honest let me be honest, too. The main reason my husband hasn’t talked before about the sinking of the SS
Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim
is because he hardly wanted to make a gift of some useful anti-British propaganda to Doctor Goebbels. Of course now that he’s been arrested it seems that this might be his only chance of staying out of a concentration camp.’

‘We don’t have much to do with the propaganda ministry, Frau Meyer. Not if we can help it. Perhaps it’s them you should be speaking to.’

‘I don’t doubt you mean what you say, Herr Gunther,’ said Siv Meyer. ‘Nevertheless British war crimes against defenceless German hospital ships make good propaganda.’

‘That’s just the kind of story which is especially useful now,’ added Klara. ‘After Stalingrad.’

I had to admit she was probably right. The surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad on February 2nd had been the greatest disaster suffered by the Nazis since their coming to power; and Goebbels’s speech on the 18th urging total war on the German people certainly needed incidents like the sinking of a hospital ship to prove that there was no way back for us now – that it was victory or nothing.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I can’t promise anything, but if you tell me where they’re holding your husband I’ll go there right now and see him, Frau Meyer. If I think there’s something in his story, I’ll contact my superiors and see if we can get him released as a key witness for an inquiry.’

‘He’s being detained at the Jewish Welfare Office, on Rosenstrasse,’ said Siv. ‘We’ll come with you, if you like.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s quite all right. I know where it is.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Klara. ‘We’re all going there anyway. To protest against Franz’s detention.’

‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ I said. ‘You’ll be arrested.’

‘There are lots of wives who are going,’ said Siv. ‘They can’t arrest us all.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve arrested all of the Jews.’

*

Hearing footsteps near my head, I tried to push the heavy wooden door off my face, but my left hand was trapped and the right too painful to use. Someone shouted something and a minute or two later I felt myself slide a little as the rubble that I lay on shifted like the scree on a steep mountain side, and then the door was lifted away to reveal my rescuers. The apartment building was almost completely gone, and all that remained in the cold moonlight was one high chimney containing an ascending series of fireplaces. Several hands placed me onto a stretcher and I was carried off the tangled, smoking heap of bricks, concrete, leaking water pipes and wooden planks and laid in the middle of the road, where I enjoyed a perfect view of a building burning in the distance and then the beams from Berlin’s defence searchlights as they continued to search the sky for enemy planes; but the siren was sounding the all-clear and I could hear the footsteps of people already coming up from the shelters to look for what was left of their homes. I wondered if my own home in Fasanenstrasse was all right. Not that there was very much in it. Nearly everything of value had been sold or traded on the black market.

Gradually, I began to move my head one way and the other until I felt able to push myself up on one elbow to look around. But I could hardly breathe: my chest was still full of dust and
smoke and the exertion provoked a fit of coughing that was only alleviated when a man I half recognized helped me to a drink of water and laid a blanket on top of me.

About a minute later there was a loud shout and the chimney came down on top of the spot where I’d been lying. The dust from its collapse covered me, so I was moved further down the street and set down next to some others who were awaiting medical attention. Klara was lying beside me now at less than an arm’s length. Her dress was hardly torn, her eyes were open, and her body was quite unmarked. I called her name several times before it finally dawned on me that she was dead. It was as if her life had just stopped like a clock, and it hardly seemed possible that so much of her future – she couldn’t have been older than thirty – had disappeared in the space of a few seconds.

Other corpses were laid out in the street next to her. I couldn’t see how many. I sat up to look for Franz Meyer and the others, but the effort was too much and I fell back and closed my eyes. And fainted, I suppose.

*

‘Give us back our men.’

You could hear them three streets away – a large and angry crowd of women – and as we turned the corner of Rosenstrasse I felt my jaw slacken. I hadn’t seen anything like this on the streets of Berlin since before Hitler came to power. And whoever would have thought that wearing a nice hat and carrying a handbag was the best way to dress when you were opposing the Nazis?

‘Release our husbands,’ shouted the mob of women as we pushed our way along the street. ‘Release our husbands now.’

There were many more of them than I had been expecting – perhaps several hundred. Even Klara Meyer looked surprised,
but not as surprised as the cops and SS who were guarding the Jewish Welfare Office. They gripped their machine pistols and rifles and muttered curses and abuse at the women standing nearest to the door and looked horrified to find themselves ignored or even roundly cursed back. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be: if you had a gun, then people were supposed to do what they were told. That’s page one of how to be a Nazi.

The welfare office on Rosenstrasse near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz was a grey granite Wilhelmine building with a saddle roof next to a synagogue – formerly the oldest in Berlin – partly destroyed by the Nazis in November 1938, and within spitting distance of the Police Praesidium where I had spent most of my adult working life. I might no longer have been working for Kripo but I’d managed to keep my beer-token – the brass identity disc that commanded such craven respect in most German citizens.

‘We’re decent German women,’ shouted one woman. ‘Loyal to the Leader and to the Fatherland. You can’t speak to us like that, you cheeky young bastard.’

‘I can speak to anyone like that who’s misguided enough to be married to a Jew,’ I heard one of the uniformed cops – a corporal – say to her. ‘Go home, lady, or you’ll be shot.’

‘You need a good spanking you little pip,’ said another woman. ‘Does your mother know you’re such an arrogant whelp?’

‘You see?’ said Klara, triumphantly. ‘They can’t shoot us all.’

‘Can’t we?’ sneered the corporal. ‘When we have the orders to shoot, I can promise you’ll get it first, granny.’

‘Take it easy corporal,’ I said and flashed my beer token in front of his face. ‘There’s really no need to be rude to these ladies. Especially on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘Yes sir,’ he said, smartly. ‘Sorry sir.’ He nodded back over his shoulder. ‘Are you going in there, sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I turned to Klara and Siv. ‘I’ll try to be as quick as I can.’

‘Then if you would be so kind,’ said the corporal, ‘we need orders, sir. No one’s told us what to do. Just to stay here and stop people from going in. Perhaps you might mention that, sir.’

I shrugged. ‘Sure, corporal. But from what I can see you’re already doing a grand job.’

‘We are?’

‘You’re keeping the peace, aren’t you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘You can’t keep the peace if you start shooting at all these ladies, now can you?’ I smiled at him and then patted his shoulder. ‘In my experience, corporal, the best police work looks like nothing at all and is always soon forgotten.’

I was unprepared for the scene that met me inside, where the smell was already intolerable: a welfare office is not designed to be a transit camp for two thousand prisoners. Men and women with identity tags on string around their necks like travelling children were lined up to use a lavatory that had no door, while others were crammed fifty or sixty to an office where it was standing room only. Welfare parcels – many of them brought by the women outside – filled another room where they had been tossed, but no one was complaining. Things were quiet. After almost a decade of Nazi rule Jews knew better than to complain. It was only the police sergeant in charge of these people who seemed inclined to bemoan his lot, and as he searched a clipboard for Franz Meyer’s name and then led me to the second-floor office where the man
was being held, he began to unroll the barbed S-wire of his sharp complaint:

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all these people. No one’s told me a damn thing. How long they’re going to be here. How to make them comfortable. How to answer all of these bloody women who are demanding answers. It’s not so easy, I can tell you. All I’ve got is what was in this office building when we turned up yesterday. Toilet paper ran out within an hour of us being here. And Christ only knows how I’m going to feed them. There’s nothing open on a Sunday.’

‘Why don’t you open those food parcels and give them that?’ I asked.

The sergeant looked incredulous. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Those are private parcels.’

‘I shouldn’t think that the people they belong to will mind,’ I said. ‘Just as long as they get something to eat.’

We found Franz Meyer seated in one of the larger offices where almost a hundred men were waiting patiently for something to happen. The sergeant called Meyer out and, still grumbling, went off to think about what I’d suggested about the parcels, while I spoke to my potential war-crimes witness in the comparative privacy of the corridor.

I told him that I worked for the War Crimes Bureau and why I was there. Meanwhile, outside the building, the women’s protest seemed to be getting louder.

‘Your wife and sisters-in-law are outside,’ I told him. ‘It’s them who put me up to this.’

‘Please tell them to go home,’ said Meyer. ‘It’s safer in here than out there, I think.’

‘I agree. But they’re not about to listen to me.’

Meyer grinned. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’

‘The sooner you tell me about what happened on the SS
Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim
, the sooner I can speak to my boss and see about getting you out of here, and the sooner we can get them all out of harm’s way.’ I paused. ‘That is if you’re prepared to give me a deposition.’