Berlin Diary (99 page)

B
ERLIN
,
December
3

A round of farewell parties which I would just as soon avoid, but can’t. An amusing incident at one of them when a Foreign Office official, more decent than most, got rather in his cups and said he had long wanted to show me something. Whereupon he took out a card showing he was a member of the secret police! I must say I hadn’t suspected him, though I knew some of his colleagues were members.

The Foreign Office still holding up my passport and exit visa, which worries me. Did my last broadcast from Berlin tonight and fear I swallowed a couple of times.

Before I went on the air Flannery called from Paris. He was quite excited about a big story he said would break day after tomorrow there. He evidently had a German official at his back, for I could not get out of him a hint as to what was up. The rumour here is that Hitler is to offer France some sort of a semi-permanent peace settlement, install Laval in power in Vichy, making Pétain a mere figurehead, in return for France’s joining the Axis and entering the fight against Britain.

B
ERLIN
,
December
4

Got my passport and official permission to leave. Nothing to do now but pack. Wally [Deuel], who is as anxious to get away as I am, left today. He was to go by plane, but the weather was bad and the Germans, who’ve lost three big passenger planes in the last three weeks—a good friend of mine was killed on one of them—sent him as far as Stuttgart by train. Hope I have better luck. I must leave all my books and most of my clothes here, as baggage accommodation on
the plane is limited. Ed Murrow promises to meet me at Lisbon. My last night in a black-out. After tonight the lights… and civilization!

I
N A PLANE
, B
ERLIN
-S
TUTTGART
,
December
5

It was still dark and a blizzard was blowing when I left the Adlon for the airport at Tempelhof this morning. There was some question whether we would take off, but at nine thirty a.m., a few minutes ago, we finally did. I don’t like this weather to fly in….

D
RESDEN
A
IRPORT
. L
ATER.—
We’ve just had a rather close call. We were about two thirds of the way to Stuttgart when our big Junkers thirty-two-passenger plane suddenly began to ice up. Through the window I could see ice forming on the wing and the two starboard motors. The stewardess, though she tried to hide it bravely, got frightened, and when a stewardess on a plane gets frightened, so do I. Perspiration began to pour down the forehead of a Lufthansa official sitting opposite me. He looked very worried. Clumps of ice breaking off from the motors hurled against the side of the cabin with a terrifying crack. The pilot, hardly able to control the plane, tried to climb, but the ice was too heavy. Finally he turned back and dived and slipped from 2,500 metres to 1,000 metres (roughly, from 8,200 to 3,200 feet).

“Can’t go lower or we’ll hit a mountain,” the Lufthansa man explained to me.

“So, so…” I said.

“Can’t use the radio because the blizzard blots it out,” he continued.

“Perhaps we could land some place,” I suggested.

“Not around here,” he said. “Ground visibility is zero.”

“So, so…” I said.

The plane tossed and dipped. Pretty soon, by the dial, I saw we were dropping below 1,000 metres. The weight of the ice was getting too much. The next fifteen minutes were an age. And then out of the mist and snow we dived towards a road. It was a two-lane
Autobahn
. We flew along fifty feet above it, but sometimes when we hit a flurry of snow or a fog spot, the pilot, momentarily blinded, zoomed up, afraid of grazing the trees or a hill. And then at eleven thirty we were skimming into an airport. It turned out to be Dresden, which is as far from Stuttgart as Berlin, if not farther. It was nice to feel one’s feet on the ground. The two pilots, when they stepped out of their cabin, looked very shaky. Over lunch here I overheard one telling the airport superintendent that he had had to fight like hell to keep his machine in the air. Weird: we had no more stepped into the lunchroom here than the noon news broadcast was switched on and the first item of news told of an American plane cracking up near the Chicago airport with several fatal casualties. It’s just an unlucky day, I guess.

I
N A PLANE
, S
TUTTGART
—L
YON
—M
AESEILLE
—B
ARCELONA
,
December
6

A slight
Katzenjammer…
last night the excitement at leaving Germany, the close shave in the plane, the nice bars in Stuttgart…. Hallet Johnson, counsellor of our Legation in Stockholm, shows up in the plane. He says I’ve been sleeping for an hour—ever since we left Stuttgart—and that this is his first
flight and that we’ve been flying blind through the clouds and… We refuel at Lyon. The German air force is in control of the field, though this is in unoccupied France. On one side of the field a large number of dismantled French war planes piled up; on the other side a hundred French planes lined up, in perfect condition—some of those planes the French never used to fight with…. A German Foreign Office official with the face of a crow looks at the junked planes and sneers: “
La Belle France!
And how we’ve destroyed her! For three hundred years, at least!”… Nearing Barcelona we skirt the coast, and suddenly off the starboard side I see our little Spanish village, Lloret de Mar, the houses white in the afternoon sun against the green hills. A long time….

L
ATER.
B
ARCELONA
.—Fascism has brought chaos and starvation here. This is not the happy, care-free Barcelona I used to know. On the Paseo, on the Ramblas, on the Plaza de Cataluña, gaunt, hungry, bitter faces moving silently about. At the Ritz Hotel, which we reach on a rickety farm wagon from the air station, because there is no oil for cars, I run into a couple of friends.

“God, what has happened here?” I ask. “I know the civil war left things in bad shape. But this…”

“There is no food,” they reply. “There is no organization. The jails are jammed and overflowing. If we told you about the filth, the overcrowding, the lack of food in them, you would not believe us. But no one really eats any more. We merely keep alive.”

At the airport the Spanish officials keep us cooped up in a tiny room all afternoon, though we are only a few. They, too, seem paralysed—incapable of the least bit of organizing. The chief officer of police has not
washed his hands for a week. His main preoccupation is our money. We count over and over for him our silver, our paper money, our travel cheques. Finally, as darkness falls, he lets us go.

Wally comes in on a German plane from Stuttgart about an hour after we have arrived. He has a tale to tell of leaving Germany. His plane had not gone from Berlin to Stuttgart and he had made the journey by train, thus losing a day. That made his exit visa run out before he could leave German soil. No official in Stuttgart at first would take the responsibility of issuing a new one. He must return to Berlin for that. To return to Berlin meant that he would have to begin all over again—wait for a new exit visa, wait for new visas for Spain and Portugal, wait months for a place in the plane from Berlin to Lisbon and more months for a place on the plane or boat from Lisbon to America. He saw his return to America postponed indefinitely, perhaps until the end of the war. At the last minute the secret police finally allowed him to depart.

E
STORIL, NEAR
L
ISBON
,
December
7

Lisbon and light and freedom and sanity at last! We flew from Barcelona to Madrid against a hundred-kilometre-an-hour gale. The pilot of the slow old Junkers-52 thought for a while he would have to turn back because of lack of fuel, but he finally made it. We bumped the whole way over the mountains, most of which we cleared by only a few feet. Air pockets so bad that two passengers hit the ceiling, one of them being knocked out by the blow.

The chaos at the Madrid airport was even worse than at Barcelona. Franco’s officers ran madly round in circles. The authorities decided that because of the gale
no planes could take off. Then they decided one of three scheduled flights could be made to Lisbon. They told me I could go, then that I couldn’t go, then that I must catch the four p.m. train, then that the train had left. All the while shouting officials and passengers milling about the place. There was a restaurant, but it had no food. In the end they called the passengers for the Lisbon plane. Only a group of Spanish officials and the German diplomat would be allowed to go. I asked for my baggage. No one knew where it was. Then an official came tearing up to me and tugged me towards a plane. No opportunity to ask about baggage or where the plane was going. In a minute we were off, flying over the ruins of the University Cité, and then down the Tagus Valley until dusk, when Lisbon came into view. At the airport the Portuguese authorities held me up a couple of hours because I could not show a ticket for New York, but finally they let me go. In Lisbon the hotels were full, no rooms to be had—the city full of refugees—but here I have found one. A good dinner tonight with some local wines and a stroll through town to stare at the lights and now to bed, feeling a great load slipping off. Ed [Murrow] arrives tomorrow from London and we shall have a mighty reunion.