Then We Take Berlin (17 page)

“Well,” he said. “This one’s from Maxim Gorky . . .”

“Ah . . . makes sense, I suppose. She knew Stalin, she knew Stravinsky. She’d know Gorky as well, wouldn’t she?”

“And this is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”

“Who’s he?”

“Another writer.” Wilderness said, feeling for the first time that he knew something Burne-Jones didn’t. “They were both writers.”

§45

The British Zone,
Germany: Spring 1945

When the Führer announced the formation of the Volkssturm in October 1944, Max Burkhardt said, “That’s it. He’s calling up old men and boys. We’re fucked now.” He might have added “cripples too” as he, born with a club foot and hence lame for life, found himself pressed into service in the Volkssturm at the beginning of November.

Shortly before Christmas, convinced that Germany would lose the war and that Berlin would fall to the Russians, who had already entered Slovakia and were at the gates of Warsaw, if Warsaw had any gates left after the SS had finished with it, Max’s wife, Marie Burkhardt, sent their fifteen-year-old daughter Hélène west to live with Great-Uncle Klaus, the elder brother of her late mother, in a village a few miles north of Celle, a mile or so off the road to Bergen, in Lower Saxony.

21 Pfefferstraße,

Charlottenburg,

Berlin

17 XII 1944

… She is a bright child, she loves to learn—but an innocent, so trusting I fear that her life will be one in which others take advantage of her. But she is brave. She has stamped her little foot and stood up for what she thinks is right, however wrong she might be, since she first learnt to talk. Take good care of her Klaus and she will be all the reward you could ever ask for.

Your loving niece,

Marie

ps Beware of her “po” face. It’s her biggest, perhaps her only failing.

Nell Burkhardt had spent the war in Berlin. Berlin was all she knew. She had no wish to leave. When the city Hitler had told his people would never be bombed was bombed late in 1940, the Nazis responded with typical efficiency with the
Kinderlandverschickung
—a scheme more aptly and more curtly named “evacuation” by the British. Berlin’s children would, effectively, be deported to rural homes and specially built camps. Nell was eleven. She had no wish to leave, and her parents—Marie, a former university tutor and Maximilian, a civil engineer for the City of Berlin—easily evaded the rules by telling the medical examiner that Nell wet the bed each night. They might just as well have said she had bubonic plague or was Jewish. Her name was off the list. She would live or die in her own wet bed.

By 1944 everything had changed. The RAF had sent bombers over in wave upon wave of hundreds of aircraft, and while the death toll was low, and Berlin had not burned like a Roman candle or, more aptly, like Hamburg, the damage to the city had been vast. Besides, the RAF and the USAF were as nothing—the tide of the war in the East had turned at Stalingrad and only a fool would think the Slavic horde would not be the first to march down Unter den Linden. So when her mother put her on a train to Celle, Nell complied. A small fawn knapsack with red leather straps contained almost all she would ever keep from her childhood.

Great-Uncle Klaus met her at the station with a pony and trap. She had seen him only once before, sometime in the midthirties, and while she had changed to the point where it might have made sense to wear a label, he had not—conspicuous by the fulsomeness of his moustache, the look of a man a generation or more out of date. Modernity an age he would never come to know.

Nell had no real idea how old Klaus was, and guessed at seventy. He had fought in the last war, and according to her mother had been middle-aged even then. He had come back from the Western Front, from the Second Battle of the Marne, a disappointed though hardly broken man, adorned with
Eiserne Kreuze
first and second class, had raised pigs in the gentlemanly manner and done his best to ignore politics, and with it history. The weather forecast mattered more to him than any speech Adolf Hitler could ever make.

Great-Uncle Klaus, being childless, had no vocabulary with which to talk to a fifteen-year-old. He sidestepped the obligation to send her to school, declined to enrol her in the local
BdM
, and offered her free access to his library—and whilst in most houses this might mean a shelf of forty or fifty books, in his it meant a room dedicated to reading, containing ten thousand books, in which Nell could continue her education on her own—ten thousand books which, she rapidly concluded, Klaus had inherited and never opened, so honed were his interests. She blew off the dust, and took a paper knife to uncut pages.

Klaus had taught himself to cook after all his household staff were directed into war work in 1941, and once the evening meal was served would engage her in conversation about the only things that seemed to interest him—Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mahler, and pigs. She knew next to nothing about the last three of these and was happy to learn. When the meal was over, often as not, the old man would wind up the gramophone and play records . . . Bruno Walter conducting Mahler’s Ninth, Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven piano sonatas. And afterwards, a finger pressed to his lips and a gentle “ssshhh,” he would tune the radio set in to the BBC.

Nell passed the most austere Christmas of her life, and had no complaints. Letters arrived from her mother, but no presents—

“There is nothing left to buy in Berlin except Berlin itself.”

And in January she turned sixteen and passed the most austere birthday of her life.

When the thaw came, late in March, a vast plume of smoke appeared in the sky a few miles to the north, black, turning grey, and a sickly-sweet smell of cooking fat hung over the house.

“What is it?” she asked.

Klaus stood on the threshold, his eyes fixed on the plume of smoke.

“The camp,” he said.

“Camp? What camp?”

He turned and went inside. Nell followed.

A soundless, invisible stamping of the little foot.

“What camp? A
Kinder
camp? A prisoner of war camp?”

He sat at the dinner table.

“You have not heard?”

“Heard what?”

“And I have not told you. Remiss of me perhaps, but I had rather you had not known, and now it seems you must. A concentration camp. A camp into which the Nazis throw people in order to forget about them—the biggest oubliette in the world—a concentration camp that exceeds even the Nazi imagination. And, if what I am told in the town is true, they have been shipping in prisoners from the east, from other camps, for months now . . . Poles, Russians, Jugoslavians . . . Dutch, French, and Belgians that have shuttled back and forth across the Reich. Just so the Russians capture empty camps and free no one—and this one, Bergen-Belsen, overflows until it bursts.”

“And the burning and the smell?”

“I fear they are burning the dead. Of whom there may well be thousands.”

That night, as ever, they listened to the BBC and she learnt that the Russians were only a few kilometres from Berlin and that the distant booming that had peppered the sky for days now was the advance of the British.

It was about three weeks later; she stepped out into the sparse sunshine of an April morning. Crisp, scentless air. There had been no more bonfires of the dead. She had asked questions in the town—no one but Klaus seemed to know anything about the camp—indeed the grocer had turned her out of his shop for daring to ask and upsetting his customers, and the burgomeister, another veteran of the last English war and an old friend of Klaus, had told her it was “nothing you should worry about.” It seemed to her that the only words missing from his evasion had been “pretty little head.”

Klaus had shot his dog in 1943. The dog was old, and he would have hated to see her starve to death. Since then the kennel had stood empty, halfway down the track between the road and the house—its felt roof peeling back and its timbers rotting.

As she approached a hand stuck out of the arch and a guttural voice said, “
Gib mir Tabak.
”

She hesitated; the voice spoke again, “
Gib mir Tabak.
”

She knelt down. The hand extended from a ragged cotton sleeve of dirty white with blue stripes. Where the roofing felt had parted a thin shaft of sunlight cut across the face of a gaunt unshaven man, hunched up with his knees against his chest. She could name every bone in the hand that held itself out to her, phalanx, carpal, metacarpal—it was less a limb than an anatomical drawing. Bone merely sheathed in skin.

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

She ran to the house. Klaus did not smoke cigarettes. She found a pipe and tobacco and matches.

A second arrangement of bones emerged to grasp the pipe, the first tamped in tobacco and struck the match, then both withdrew into the kennel and a cloud passed across the face of the sun, the stripe of light vanished, and only a wisp of fragrant smoke drifting out showed where the man was.

Later she and Klaus split their rations three ways and she put a portion of their evening meal out on a plate, just as she would in giving leftovers to a dog.

“He must have escaped,” Klaus said simply.

The next morning she approached with bread and apple jam and ersatz coffee made from roasted acorns. Last night’s plate was empty, but next to it a pile of vomit.

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

A British jeep roared by.

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

The jeep pulled up sharply and reversed.

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

Two men got out. A corporal-driver who stood by the car and a captain who approached her.

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

The captain had the initials R.A.M.C. on a band sewn onto each shoulder, atop a large and curious serpent symbol. He looked at the hand, he looked at the house, he looked at her.

“Do you live here?”

Accurate, if oddly accented German.

“With my uncle. An old man.”

He knelt down, peered into the dog kennel.

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

“How long has he been here?”

“Since this time yesterday.”

“He must have escaped. The Wehrmacht have gone. There’s just a few SS left now. He must have just slipped out. I’ll have to take him back.”

“But . . .”

“But what?”

“The Wehrmacht have gone. You just said so. They have surrendered. There is no need to take him back.”

“Oh no, my dear. Not a surrender, just a truce. We took the camp without a shot fired, that was the deal. He has escaped from us not them. I can’t let him go or let any of the prisoners go. Typhus, you see. It could spread like a forest fire.”

He knelt down again.

“Come on, old chap, we’ll soon have you fixed up.”

What came back was gibberish to him.

“Oh hell.”

Nell said, “I think the only German he knows is how to ask for tobacco. He answered you in Polish.”

“
Gib mir Tabak.
”

“And at least let me get him some.”

She dashed into the house, came back with a fat pinch of Klaus’s tobacco. Both hands appeared, the tamping down and the lighting up.

“You speak Polish?”

“Yes.”

“Well . . . see if you can’t coax him out.”

Before she could say a word a big British Army truck came up the road from Celle and stopped by the jeep. A short fat Army major climbed down from the cab. The captain saluted, after a fashion.

“What’s going on here?”

The captain explained and when he had finished the major turned and bellowed at the truck.

“Jones! McKay! Crawley! On the double!”

Three enlisted men came running.

“Get this bugger on the truck. Now!”

Then he turned to Nell.

“You too, and anyone else who lives here. Crawley, round ’em up.”

The first two men lifted the roof off the dog kennel, then they lifted out the skeletal man clamped on the end of Klaus’s pipe. He made no move to cooperate, said nothing, and blew smoke. It seemed to Nell he was weightless and if the soldiers let go he might drift off into air as lightly as his puffs of smoke. The third soldier emerged from the house, gently propelling Klaus along with the flat of his hand against his back.

He slung his rifle, slipped his free hand around Nell’s upper arm and escorted them both to the back of the truck. The skeletal man sat on the edge by the tailgate, still hunched up, bony chin resting on bony knees, drawing on the now lifeless pipe. Klaus reached into his pocket and handed him more matches. The crab hands flicked one into life.