The first woman on her list had narrowly escaped a Gestapo trap in the summer of 1944, and spent several nights with Effi and Ali while the Swede Erik Aslund arranged a more permanent refuge. She now lived in a smart first-floor apartment over what had once been a restaurant. She greeted Effi with a heartfelt hug, and answered her apologetic request for an affidavit with an immediate yes. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many people have asked me to sign theirs,’ she said. ‘People who wouldn’t have lifted a finger for me if they’d known I was a Jew. Now they all say they knew. So signing a statement for someone who really did help me will be a pleasure.’
She had known one Otto Pappenheim before the war, but he had been in his seventies. And she had known several Rosenfelds, but not a Miriam. She would ask around.
The other woman on Ali’s list who lived in Friedrichshain had only stayed one night in the Bismarckstrasse apartment, but Effi remembered her better. Lucie’s whole world had collapsed on that one particular evening in 1942. As a Jewish — and therefore unofficial — nurse, she’d been returning from an emergency call when the Gestapo arrived in front of her house. Cowering in a doorway, she’d heard shots inside the building and seen her elderly parents frog-marched into a waiting Black Maria. This had soon sped away, leaving uniformed police standing guard outside the front door. There was no sign of her husband and teenage son, and Lucie of course had feared the worst. Only a friend’s determination had got her as far as Bismarckstrasse, and Effi had spent most of the night trying to comfort her. Lucie’s face on the following morning, when news arrived of her husband and son’s escape, had been a sight to treasure.
And all three had survived, as Effi found when she reached their home. The husband greeted her with obvious suspicion, but Lucie recognised her immediately. ‘Frau von Freiwald!’ she exclaimed, jumping up from her chair, and rushing to embrace her.
‘My real name’s Effi Koenen,’ Effi said once they were done.
‘Not the actress?’ Lucie’s husband said in surprise.
‘The same,’ Effi admitted with reluctance.
Many questions followed, and it was almost an hour before Effi could leave with the promise of another signature. Neither Lucie nor her husband had come across an Otto Pappenheim or a Miriam Rosenfeld, but Lucie was doing voluntary shifts as a nurse at Lehrter Station, and said that she would check through what records there were. All their arrivals came from the East, but some at least were returnees, from either hiding or imprisonment. Otto and Miriam might be among them.
Effi enjoyed the time with Lucie and her family, but as she walked back down Neue Konigstrasse towards the old city centre a dark cloud of depression seemed to roll across her mind. She missed Rosa, and the search for the girl’s father seemed set to be endless. Looking for someone in Berlin reminded her of pyramid schemes, each helping hand seemed to spawn ten more. And the movie… She was loving the involvement, but that too seemed a string without end. When would she ever get back to London? And then there was Russell’s problem. Once she had finished her movie, and they’d done all they could to find Otto, she at least could return. But he would still be stuck here.
She wondered again about bringing Rosa back to Berlin, and the ruins around her seemed answer enough. In time, perhaps, but not in winter, not until… what? Until the rubble had been taken away, until all the windows had glass, until the Tiergarten had trees? Her train of thought was interrupted by a cruising jeep full of Red Army soldiers, all of whom seemed to be staring at her. She probably looked too old for sober predators, but she aged her walk just in case.
The jeep sped away.
Until the Russians had gone, she added to her list. But how long would all that take? The war had been over for six months, and Berlin was still in pieces. How many years would it be before a normal life was possible?
It was all so uncertain. She’d always thought of Thomas as a rock, but even he seemed unsure what to do. The way he’d been talking the other night she half-expected him to announce his retirement, and retreat to his in-laws’ country farm. But could he afford it? If his money was all tied up in the works, then the Soviets held the whip hand.
She was reminded of her own flat, and decided to see if it was still there. A crowded Stadtbahn train carried her from Alexanderplatz to Zoo, and the old familiar walk brought her to Carmerstrasse as the last light faded in the western sky. The building was still standing, and lights were burning in the first floor flat that her parents had bought her all those years ago. As she stood and watched, the silhouette of a woman cradling a baby appeared on the thin curtains, and Effi thought she heard an infant crying.
Should she walk right in and assert her ownership? No, or at least not now. There were already too many things to do and worry about — for a fleeting moment she felt more overwhelmed than she ever had in the war. Survival had been such a simple ambition.
Russell spent the early afternoon visiting two more DP camps. Both were in the American zone — one in Neukolln, the other on the edge of Tempelhof aerodrome — but neither had any record of the two they were seeking. At the second camp one of the American administrators told him that all the Jewish inmates had recently been moved to their own exclusive camp in Bavaria. Berlin’s other Jewish DPs would probably go the same way, the man thought, and Russell could see why they’d want to. But he couldn’t help wishing that they’d put off moving until he found Otto and Miriam.
Realising he wasn’t that far from the Redlich address, he decided to get it over with.
Paul had run into fourteen year-old Werner Redlich and his Hitlerjugend unit during the final days of the war. Having already lost his father in the North African campaign, the boy fretted about his mother and sister back in Berlin. When a decent Wehrmacht officer discovered how young he was, and suggested that he return home, Werner had offered only token resistance. And then the boy had walked into an SS patrol, which promptly hanged him as a deserter.
Paul had written it all down. He had thought of saying that Werner had died in battle, thereby saving mother and daughter anguish, but if by some chance the body had been returned to them, then the rope burn on the throat would have undermined everything else he said. And he wanted them to know how brave their son and brother had been, and how much the boy had cared for them.
But as Russell now discovered, it was all beside the point. The address was no longer there.
He found a neighbour who had known the family. According to her, Frau Redlich and her daughter had been buried in their basement when a bomb collapsed their building. The son, she added, had not come home.
‘He was killed,’ Russell told her.
‘Maybe a blessing,’ the woman murmured.
No, Russell thought as he walked away. A family wiped out could never be that.
Back at the house on Vogelsangstrasse, he found the kitchen occupied by the Fermaiers and Niebels. The old couple were busy preparing a meagre-looking dinner, and Frau Fermaier gave Russell what felt like a warning look, as if she feared his asking to share. Frau Niebel and her daughter were sitting at the table, their rations neatly piled in front of them, waiting their turn at the stove. The mother wished Russell a curt good evening before turning her face away, and the daughter gave him a blank look, as if she’d never seen him before.