Yes, Ernestine thought, Father is always right ... always. Father is never wrong. “Did you know about slaves in your Labor Bureau?”
He smashed his fist on the table. “How dare you!”
“Apologize to your father,” Herta demanded.
“I am sorry, Father. Forgive me.”
Her sister, Hilde, pushed away from the table and walked away. Arguments! Always damned arguments!
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Where?”
“Just out of here.”
“When will you be back?”
Hilde shrugged and left.
“All day she is gone,” Bruno said. “Where does she spend her time? Where does she get that stuff to paint her face?”
“Uncle Ulrich gave it to her,” Ernestine said quickly. “I must go to work.”
“Think about Ulrich’s offer. Think about us,” her father said as she left.
When in the devil will she learn to leave the past alone, Bruno thought when she left. Life is hard enough. The future looks hollow. Fate has been cruel.
Herta packed a small sack containing a tin with five ounces of tobacco strained out of cigarette butts that Bruno had gathered at the beer garden and she put in a number of bars of soap made from laundry scrapings that she had remelted. Herta was clever in the ways of the open barter market in the Tiergarten, where trading was permitted.
She learned to stay clear of the Russian soldiers who had been paid in occupation currency which was near worthless
in Berlin and which they could not send home. They were forced to work the barter market themselves, and bullied merciless bargains.
“Try to get a camera,” Bruno said. “I have a line with some Ami soldiers. I will be able to get up to a dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes for a decent one.”
A dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes! A dozen bags of gold!
The underground took Ernestine out of Steglitz to the center of the city. She had to take a round-about way to get to the hospital where she worked in Neukölln as a nurse’s aide. In the last-ditch fighting many parts of the subway system had been flooded, forcing innumerable detours.
The car was filled with sallow, ragged people. She was a bit lightheaded, now remorseful about the question she had asked her father. Of course he would not know about slave labor. It was the times. One had to remember father was a respected official and had given them all a good life. It was a pity to see so proud a man reduced to poverty.
How could she really tell him why she worked for Dr. Hahn and could not take Uncle Ulrich’s offer?
Hospital? It was a sorry excuse for a hospital. Half bombed out, boarded windows, stripped down to the bedding by the Russians. It was filled with patients, even in the corridors, and there was a shortage of everything. So many old people died these days in a state of confusion, and the newborn screamed into a world of hunger and fear.
Only yesterday the gas was turned on in a section of Neukölln and the hospital received nearly a hundred suicides and attempted suicides. Ten yesterday had died of dysentery, typhus, and diphtheria. Half were little children.
Ernestine followed the lethargic line of trudgers to Potsdamer Platz, close to what was once the heart of Berlin. It was too horrible to walk in Berlin any more. The city was a grotesque, surrealist graveyard palled in a gray mist. The half lifeless who staggered about were damned and tormented.
Dietrich Rascher was dead. When she grew fuzzy-minded she thought of him. At first she would not accept that he would never return, even after the last letter from Stalingrad. But there would be no miracle.
In the last years, through the agony of Berlin, it was Ernestine who was the one of calm strength in the Falkenstein family. They all looked to her, even her father. She held them together during the bombings, the news of Gerd’s capture, the rape by the Russians. But now, Ernestine was unable to keep from plunging into deep smoky pits and mazes.
She came to the Tiergarten; barter market and black market were in full swing.
She stared at ravaged trees and gardens and for a moment in her haze she was once again strolling with father and Dietrich down flower-lined paths and the band was playing Strauss waltzes and the people drank strawberry beer ... Berlin! Paris on the Spree, the Athens of the East!
She was carried with the moving river of human misery into the subway again. The melancholy that had been running days and nights together closed in on her. She put her face in her hands. The train wheels sang out ... Dachau ... Dachau ... Dachau....
The visions came to her as they came in her terrible dreams: a clear recollection of sullen silences in her law office before the war; there were questions that were not asked; a clear recollection of those long moments of searching her father’s eyes when he did not want to look at her; a faint recollection of the names of Jewish playmates; a blurred remembrance of Uncle Ulrich’s strange disappearance and of the whispers after the hanging of Uncle Wolfgang.
More than any of it, Ernestine vividly relived those moments when Dietrich Rascher was on leave from the Eastern Front and of his drunken babblings. She remembered the little music box he had given her and a rain-streaked hotel window where they loved... she remembered him blurting out the name of Blobel ... Colonel Blobel ... Kiev ... Commandos 4A Special Action Group C.
“Auschwitz station!”
She looked up horrified.
“Grenzalle station,” the trainman repeated.
It was a mile to the hospital. The surface transportation was either by ricksha bicycle or horse-drawn street car. The street car was filled beyond capacity, no rickshas around. She walked on foot down Rudower Allee. It was dangerous because it was close to the Russian Sector and oftentimes they crossed over and accosted Germans on the streets, and other Germans were powerless to stop them.
“Hey, fraulein,” an American soldier said, blocking her way.
She looked at him. He was young, like Gerd, and he was nervous about trying to pick her up. “Ich have cigaretten .. . and ... uh ... chockolade ...”
“Bitte,” she pleaded, and brushed past him quickly.
She was alone on the dead street. Walls of shorn buildings like large fingers hovered above her. With each step, Dietrich Rascher’s mumblings beat into her brain.
Then, yesterday she heard it! “This is the People’s Radio. We announce a massacre outside Kiev at the pits of Babi Yar. It is now confirmed that 33,000 Jews were gunned down in open pits. It was the work of Colonel Blobel, Special Action Group C!”
Dietrich Rascher! Ernestine struggled up the last three steps to the hospital door. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she toppled to the ground.
No one got excited. This sort of thing happened every few seconds in Berlin these days.
Chapter Six
EVEN AT THIS MOMENT of self-criticism there was an undeniable air of satisfaction as Heinrich Hirsch reviewed the accomplishments of the German People’s Liberation Committee.
Rudi Wöhlman closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips together, and nodded in rhythm to Hirsch’s monologue as though he were beating time to music.
The other two Germans present formed the inner circle. There was Adolph Schatz, appointed president of police, and Heinz Eck, appointed deputy mayor of the city.
V. V. Azov sat dull-eyed at the end of the table, in his usual posture of no commitment of pleasure or displeasure.
Heinrich flipped a page. The final tally was that 85 per cent of the Western Sectors were stripped of “war-making” potential before arrival of the British and Americans.
Before the arrival of the West:
A banking monopoly had been established in the Soviet Sector, controlling the finances of the city;