Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,108
Mike Rose said. “In the States, we didn’t do enough. We didn’t see it coming. We should have, we have no excuses, but we didn’t see it. In 1939 a boat carrying a thousand Jewish refugees from Europe was turned away by the U.S. and Britain and Canada. That’s something we should never forget.”
Gudrun took a photograph out of her apron pocket. “Look,” she said. “It’s from England. The Red Cross sent it with a letter.”
“These are your children?” Natalia wiped her hands and took the photograph.
Mike Rose said, “Your kids are almost the same ages as mine. They look like you, Gudrun.”
“Elise, my daughter, looks like her father,” she said. “She has his smile. My little boy’s name is Henry. In the letter it says they’re thriving, but of course it would say that, wouldn’t it? They should be wearing coats in that wind.”
Mike stood. He started to go into the house and then turned and asked if Gudrun and Natalia had heard the news. President Truman had delivered an ultimatum to Japan: unconditional surrender or an escalation in the bombing campaign. Hiroshi Ō-shima, the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, had been flown to New York. It was believed he would recommend to Tokyo an acceptance of the terms of surrender, as drawn up at the conference.
“And the war in the Pacific will end, maybe,” Natalia said. “And there will be peace.”
She and Gudrun went inside and started getting supper ready. Gudrun drained steaming water from a pot of boiled potatoes and then sat with Natalia at the table, where she was shelling peas.
“When you see your children, it won’t seem like you were apart that long,” Natalia said.
Gudrun said that at times she wanted only to give up. Two years earlier, when she got kicked out of her apartment in Charlottenburg by the Nazis, she went to stay with a cousin in Berlin Mitte. She helped with the housework and looked after her cousin’s twin daughters. Then, this April, as the Russians were entering Berlin, Gudrun went out to shop for food. She waited hours in a queue for a loaf of bread and some tinned beans and when she returned to the apartment, she found her cousin and her family dead. Her cousin’s husband had shot the little girls and his wife and then himself. The gun was still in his hand. He had, Gudrun knew, been taking an amphetamine called Pervitin to keep himself awake at night, in case the Russians came. People did that. There was a big demand for that drug. She believed in his case the drug had caused a mental breakdown, because otherwise he would never have harmed his family. In Berlin there were suicides every day. People knew what the Russians had done in Pomerania, as they marched west. They had heard of the rapes and torture and murders. Gudrun covered her cousin’s body, and those of the children and the husband, with bedsheets, and locked the apartment door, put the key under the doormat, and walked away. She should have taken her cousin’s gun with her.
“At night I hid in the ruins. For a few days friends let me stay with them, until the Russians got too close, and I left.
“In the Tiergarten,” she said, “there were dead SS men lying on the ground. It looked like Hell, like a vision of Hell, everything black and dead, the trees gone, dead animals in the zoo. Imagine being an animal in a cage with bombs falling and antiaircraft guns firing. Imagine. There was a boy. He had been dead for some time. A child, no older than fourteen, a cheap celluloid swastika pinned to his coat, no doubt conscripted to man the flak tower in the Tiergarten.
“Often I feel such shame. Many things have happened that I feel shame over. The Russians caught up to me. Even though it wasn’t my fault, I felt like it was. I thought of throwing myself into the canal. But my kids shouldn’t lose both parents, I told myself. It’s strange, isn’t it? When you want to die, you don’t. Somehow you go on living.”
“Yes,” Natalia said. “Somehow you do.”
“In England there’s a nursing home for elderly Jewish refugees. Daphne told me about it. She said I could get a job there, as a cleaner, or helping in the kitchen maybe, or as a cook, and if it works out, I’ll stay. I won’t come back to Germany.”