A Man Without Breath (3 page)

‘It’s my only chance of avoiding a concentration camp, I think.’

‘Or worse,’ I added, by way of extra incentive.

‘Well, that’s honest, I suppose.’ He shrugged.

‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’

He nodded and we spent the next thirty minutes writing out his statement about what had happened off the coast of Norway in August 1941. When he’d signed it, I wagged my finger at him.

‘Coming here like this I’m sticking my neck out for you,’ I told him. ‘So you’d better not let me down. If I so much as get a whiff of you changing your story I’ll wash my hands of you. Got that?’

He nodded. ‘So why are you sticking your neck out?’

It was a good question and probably it deserved an answer, but I hardly wanted to go into how a friend of a friend had asked me to help, which is how these things usually got fixed in Germany; and I certainly didn’t want to mention how attractive I found his sister-in-law Klara, or that I was making up for some lost time when it came to helping Jews; and maybe a bit more than only lost time.

‘Let’s just say I don’t like the Tommies very much and leave it at that, shall we?’ I shook my head. ‘Besides, I’m not promising anything. It’s up to my boss, Judge Goldsche. If he thinks your deposition can start an inquiry into a British war crime, he’s the one who’ll have to persuade the Foreign Office that this is worth a white book, not me.’

‘What’s a white book?’

‘An official publication that’s intended to present the German side of an incident that might amount to a violation of the laws of war. It’s the Bureau that does all the leg work, but it’s the Foreign Office that publishes the report.’

‘That sounds as if it might take a while.’

I shook my head. ‘Fortunately for you, the Bureau and the judge have a great deal of power. Even in Nazi Germany. If the judge buys your story we’ll have you home tomorrow.’

Wednesday, March 3rd 1943

They took me to the state hospital in Friedrichshain. I was suffering from a concussion and smoke inhalation; the smoke inhalation was nothing new, but as a result of the concussion the doctor advised me to stay in bed for a couple of days. I’ve always disliked hospitals – they sell just a little too much reality for my taste. But I did feel tired. Being bombed by the RAF will do that to you. So the advice of this fresh-faced aspirin Jesus suited me very well. I thought I was due a bit of time with my feet up and my mouth in traction. Besides, I was a lot better off in hospital than in my apartment. They were still feeding patients in the state hospital, which was more than I could say about home, where the pot was empty.

From my window I had a nice view of the St Georg’s cemetery, but I didn’t mind that: the state hospital faces the Böhmisches Brewery on the other side of Landsberger Allee, which means there’s always a strong smell of hops in the air. I can’t think of a better way to encourage a Berliner’s recovery than the smell of German beer. Not that we saw much of it in the city’s bars: most of the beer brewed in Berlin went
straight to our brave boys on the Russian front. But I can’t say that I grudged them a couple of brews. After Stalingrad I expect they needed a taste of home to keep their spirits up. There wasn’t a great deal else to keep a man’s spirits up in the winter of 1943.

Either way I was better off than Siv Meyer and her sisters, who were all dead. The only survivors of that night were me and Franz, who was in the Jewish Hospital. Where else? The bigger surprise was that there was a Jewish Hospital in the first place.

I was not without visitors. Renata Matter came to see me. It was Renata who told me my own home was undamaged and who gave me the news about the Meyer sisters. She was pretty upset about it too, and being a good Roman Catholic she had already spent the morning praying for their souls. She seemed just as upset by the news that the priest of St Hedwig’s, Bernhard Lichtenberg, had been put in prison and seemed likely to be sent to Dachau where – according to her – more than two thousand priests were already incarcerated. Two thousand priests in Dachau was a depressing thought. That’s the thing about hospital visitors: sometimes you wish they simply hadn’t bothered to come along and try to cheer you up.

This was certainly how I felt about my other visitor, a commissar from the Gestapo called Werner Sachse. I knew Sachse from the Alex, and in truth he wasn’t a bad fellow for a Gestapo officer, but I knew he wasn’t there to bring me the gift of a Stollen and an encouraging word. He wore hair as neat as the lines in a carpenter’s notebook, a black leather coat that creaked like snow under your feet when he moved, and a black hat and black tie that made me uncomfortable.

‘I’ll have the brass handles and the satin lining please,’ I said. ‘And an open casket, I think.’

Sachse’s face looked puzzled.

‘I guess your pay grade doesn’t run to black humour. Just black ties and coats.’

‘You’d be surprised.’ He shrugged. ‘We have our jokes in the Gestapo.’

‘Sure you do. Only they’re called evidence for the People’s Court in Moabit.’

‘I like you Gunther, so you won’t mind if I warn you about making jokes like that. Especially after Stalingrad. These days it’s called “undermining defensive strength” and they cut your head off for it. Last year they beheaded three people a day for making jokes like that.’

‘Haven’t you heard? I’m sick. I’ve got concussion. I can hardly breathe. I’m not myself. If they cut my head off I probably wouldn’t notice anyway. That’s my defence if this comes to court. What is your pay grade anyway, Werner?’

‘A3. Why do you ask?’

‘I was just wondering why a man who makes six hundred marks a week would come all this way to warn me about undermining our defensive strength – assuming such a thing actually exists after Stalingrad.’

‘It was just a friendly warning. In passing. But that’s not why I’m here, Gunther.’

‘I can’t imagine you’re here to confess to a war crime, Werner. Not yet, anyway.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘I wonder how far we could get with that before they cut off both our heads?’

‘Tell me about Franz Meyer.’

‘He’s sick, too.’

‘Yes, I know. I just came from the Jewish Hospital.’

‘How is he?’

Sachse shook his head. ‘Doing really well. He’s in a coma.’

‘You see? I was right. Your pay grade doesn’t run to humour. These days you need to be at least a Kriminalrat before they allow you to make jokes that are actually funny.’

‘The Meyers were under surveillance, did you know that?’

‘No. I wasn’t there long enough to notice. Not with Klara around. She was a real beauty.’

‘Yes, it’s too bad about
her
, I agree.’ He paused. ‘You were in their apartment, twice. On the Sunday and then the Monday evening.’

‘That’s correct. Hey, I don’t suppose the V-men who were watching the Meyers got killed, too?’

‘No. They’re still alive.’

‘Pity.’

‘But who says they were V-men? This wasn’t an undercover operation. I expect the Meyers knew they were being watched, even if you were too dumb to notice.’

He lit a couple of cigarettes and put one in my mouth.

‘Thanks, Werner.’

‘Look, you big dumb ugly bastard, you might as well know it was me and some of the other lads from the Gestapo who found you and pulled you off that pile of rubble before the chimney came down. It was the Gestapo who saved your life, Gunther. So you see we must have a sense of humour. The sensible thing would probably have been to have left you there to get crushed.’

‘Straight?’

‘Straight.’

‘Then thanks. I owe you one.’

‘That’s what I figured. It’s why I’m here asking about Franz Meyer.’

‘All right. I’m listening. Get your klieg light and switch it on.’

‘Some honest answers. You owe me that much at least.’

I took a short drag on my cigarette – just to get my breath – and then nodded. ‘That and this smoke. It actually tastes like a proper nail.’

‘What were you doing in Lützowerstrasse? And don’t say “just visiting”.’

‘When Franz Meyer got picked up by the Gestapo in the factory action, his missus figured on the War Crimes Bureau pulling his coal out of the fire. He was the only surviving witness to a war crime when a Tommy submarine torpedoed a hospital ship off the coast of Norway in 1941. The SS
Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim
. I took his deposition and then persuaded my boss to sign an order for his release.’

‘And what was in this for you?’

‘That’s my job, Werner. They point my suit at a possible crime and I try to check it out. Look, I won’t deny that the Meyers were very grateful. They invited me to dinner and opened their last bottle of Spätburgunder in celebration of Meyer’s release from the Jewish Welfare Office on Rosenstrasse. We were raising a glass when the bomb hit. But I can’t deny that I had a certain satisfaction in sticking one on the Tommies. Sanctimonious bastards. According to them, the
Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim
was just a troop-carrying convoy and not a hospital ship at all. Twelve hundred men drowned. Troops, perhaps, but injured troops who were returning home to Germany. His deposition is with my boss, Judge Goldsche. You can read it for yourself and see if I’m telling the truth.’

‘Yes, I checked. But why didn’t you all go to the shelter with everyone else?’

‘Meyer’s a Jew. He’s not allowed in the shelter.’

‘All right, but what about the rest of you? The wife, her sisters – none of them was a Jew. You must admit that’s a bit suspicious.’

‘We didn’t think the air raid was for real. So we decided to stick it out.’

‘Fair enough.’ Sachse sighed. ‘None of us will make that mistake again, I suppose. Berlin is a ruin. St Hedwig’s is burned out, Prager Platz is just rubble, and the hospital on Lützowerstrasse was completely destroyed. The RAF dropped more than a thousand tons of bombs. On civilian targets. Now that’s what I call a fucking war crime. While you’re at it, investigate that, will you?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Did the Meyers make any mention of any foreign currency? Swiss francs, perhaps?’

‘You mean for me?’ I shook my head. ‘No. I wasn’t even offered a lousy packet of cigarettes.’ I frowned. ‘Are you saying those bastards had money?’

Sachse nodded.

‘Well, they never offered me any.’

‘Any mention of a man called Wilhelm Schmidhuber?’

‘No.’

‘Friedrich Arnold? Julius Fliess?’

I shook my head.

‘Operation Seven, perhaps?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer?’

‘The pastor?’

Sachse nodded.

‘No. I’d have remembered his name. What’s this all about, Werner?’

Sachse took a pull on his cigarette, glanced at the man in the next bed, and drew his chair closer to me – close enough to smell his Klar Klassik shaving water; even on the Gestapo it made a pleasant change from stale bandages, piss on the windowpanes and forgotten bedpans.

‘Operation Seven was a plan to help seven Jews escape from Germany to Switzerland.’

‘Seven important Jews?’

‘No such thing. Not anymore. All of the important Jews have left Germany or are – well, they’ve left. No, these were just seven ordinary Jews.’

‘I see.’

‘Of course the Swiss are every bit as anti-Semitic as we are and won’t do anything unless it’s for money. We believe the conspirators were obliged to raise a large sum of money in order to ensure that these Jews could pay their own way and not constitute a burden on the Swiss state. This money was smuggled into Switzerland. Operation Seven was originally Operation Eight, however, and included Franz Meyer. We had them under surveillance in the hope that they might lead us to the other conspirators.’

‘That’s too bad.’

Werner Sachse nodded slowly. ‘I believe your story,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Werner. I appreciate it. All the same, I assume you still searched my pockets for Swiss francs when I was lying on the street.’

‘Of course. When you turned up I thought we’d hit pay-dirt. You can see how very sad I was to discover you were probably on the level.’

‘It’s like I always say, Werner. There’s nothing quite as disappointing as the discovery that our friends and neighbours are no more dishonest than we are ourselves.’

Friday, March 5th 1943

A couple of days later the doctor gave me some more aspirin, advised me to get plenty of fresh air to help with my breathing, and told me I could go home. Berlin was rightly famous for its air, but it wasn’t always so fresh – not since the Nazis had taken over.

Coincidentally, it was the same day the authorities told the Jews still held in the welfare office that they could go home too. I couldn’t believe it when I heard, and I imagine that the men and women who were released could believe it even less than me. The authorities had gone so far as to track down some Jews who’d already been deported and had them sent back to Berlin and released, like the others.

What was happening here? What was in the minds of the government? Was it possible that after the huge defeat at Stalingrad the Nazis were losing their grip? Or had they really listened to the protests of a thousand determined German women? It was hard to tell, but it seemed the only possible conclusion. There were ten thousand Jews who had been arrested on February 27th, and of these, less than two thousand had gone to Rosenstrasse. Some had been remanded to the
Clou concert hall on Mauerstrasse, others to the stables of a barracks on Rathenower Strasse, and still more to a synagogue on Levetzowstrasse in Moabit. But it was only at the Rosenstrasse, where Jews married to Germans were detained, that a protest had taken place, and it was only there that any Jews were released. The way I heard it later, all of the Jews from the other sites were deported to the East. But if the protest really had worked, it begged the question, what might have been achieved if mass protests had taken place before? It was a sobering thought that the first organized opposition to the Nazis in ten years had probably succeeded.

That was one sobering thought. Another was that if I hadn’t helped Franz Meyer he would certainly have stayed in the welfare office in Rosenstrasse and his wife and sisters would probably have remained with the rest of the women outside, in which case all of them would still live. Homeless, perhaps. But alive, yes, that was quite conceivable. There’s no amount of aspirin you can swallow that will take away that kind of toothache.