Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,107
She saw small children running in packs, like wild dogs. She saw a dead horse that had been butchered for its meat, the carcass heaving with huge, fat flies. Beneath the rubble, bodies were interred; the stench of decay was unendurable. She saw buildings on Friedrichstrasse and Leipziger Strasse bombed nearly flat. She saw Russian soldiers. She saw German women made to clear the rubble. They wore dresses, high heels, some of them. They wore scarves to keep the dust out of their hair. They were guarded by American soldiers with guns, and yet the women could smile; there were signs of camaraderie.
Nowhere in the city was there a place for the eye to rest. No clean, straight lines, no right angles. Berlin had been gutted, pulverized. This was Stunde Null. Zero hour. That was the term she heard. There couldn’t be anywhere to go from here but up, could there? Already the Americans had restored water and electricity to Berlin. The tramlines and the U-Bahn were operating; cabarets and restaurants and shops were reopening.
Messages were chalked on brick walls, scrawled on windows; notes were nailed to posts: Have you seen my mother? Have you seen my parents? Where are my parents?
“If you could drop me off,” she said to James, “I could look on my own.”
No, he said. She must not be alone in Berlin. There was a lot of crime in the city. Red Army soldiers stole from everyone. They stole watches, wine. They swaggered through Berlin, intoxicated, undisciplined and behaved without decency toward German women. It wasn’t only the Russians, either. Mostly the Russians but not exclusively the Russians, James said.
Gudrun, too, had told Natalia about the rape of women in Berlin. In eastern cities, in Danzig, the Russians spared no woman, not the very young or the very old. The women were raped and killed, the men tortured and killed. That, she thought, was how it went: the conquerors took what they wanted from the conquered.
* * *
President Truman came to Berlin for a conference in Potsdam. Truman, Churchill, and Stalin were meeting at the Cecilienhof, once the palace of the Prussian crown prince, to work out the conditions of the peace. Mike Rose told Natalia and Gudrun he’d spent the day chauffeuring Potsdam Conference delegates around Berlin. He said he’d heard two generals saying that at the conference Truman and Stalin sparred with each other through their translators, while Molotov stood at Stalin’s right arm like a well-trained dog. Mike had been there when Churchill toured the Reich Chancellery. Churchill had placed his hand on a globe of the world in what had been the Führer’s office. Then he sat in Hitler’s personal chair, after a British soldier had tested it to make sure it was safe. Wherever he went in Berlin, Churchill attracted crowds; people tried to shake his hand, touch his coat. These were Germans, Mike said.
Mike said being that close to Nazi rule, the actual place where they’d planned and carried out the worst evil the world had ever seen, gave him the creeps.
Gudrun and Natalia were sitting on the steps at the back of the house, and Mike was standing, smoking a cigarette. Gudrun had snipped a few sprigs of parsley and held them in her hands. In 1939, before the war started, she said, she and her husband had sent their children to England. Her husband was Jewish, and she was Lutheran, but they weren’t religious. There was anti-Semitism in Germany before 1938, but with the Nuremberg Laws the Nazis institutionalized racial hatred; they made it an obligation. Even if Jews had been born in Germany and their families had lived in Germany for generations and had established businesses in Germany, or were doctors or lawyers or had sacrificed their sons in war for Germany, as her husband’s family had, the Nazis said they had no right to live and work in Germany. Hitler said they had no right to exist. In August 1939, Gudrun and her husband got their children to England on a Kindertransport. Her little boy was only three then, and he was eight, nearly nine now, and her daughter would soon be fifteen. Gudrun feared she would be a stranger to her children, a stranger who had to tell them their father had died in a concentration camp. According to his death certificate he had died of heart failure, but Gudrun knew it wasn’t like that. Her husband had been thirty-eight and in excellent health.