Therefore Choose (27 page)

When the Russians first arrived they found bicycles, and like children they learned to ride them, there in the street in front of Anna's building, laughing and having a wonderful time. When the unit moved, they left the bicycles in the building's courtyard. Anna recounted in her diary how she borrowed one and rode it towards the centre of the city. Enough of the rubble had been cleared from some of the bombed and shelled streets, and she reached the corner of the three cafés, in Unter den Linden. She wrote:

The cafés were shattered. Café Bauer, where George
and I sat in that era before the beginning of history,
was a heap of shapeless masonry. I imagined us
sitting at the table and being crushed by huge
beams as they fell from the ceiling, knocked
senseless by stones that had been shaped and
hauled painstakingly upwards to make the walls.
It had taken years to create the building. It took
just a moment for the stones to fall. How is it
that human society that once seemed so solid,
with books and cafés, is so fragile? How is it
that human beings are so swift and skilled at
destruction, so slow and uncertain at creation?

At nine o'clock next morning
, George met Anna in a small coffee shop for which she'd given him the address. It was on a side street, and the building was still intact. There was just one room — not large — with oak panelling halfway up the wall, and eight or nine tables. The place had a timid look of permanency.

“Would you like some coffee?” George said. “Do they have proper coffee here?”

George ordered coffee. He handed Anna her diary.

“Now you've read it,” she said. “Are you appalled? Werner was appalled. He hated it. Do you think me a whore?”

He shook his head and looked towards the floor, thinking of the awfulness of what she had been through, wishing he could comfort her.

“I've been asking people about their experience of being bombed by the British,” said George. “Not many people have anything to say.”

“There's not much to say.”

“But you've said it. You've articulated the moment in time, of being … invaded.”

“Invaded. That's the right word.”

“An explanation … an account. I don't know what to say. I'm very moved.”

“You shouldn't feel bad,” she said.

“How did you manage?”

“The worst of it was, still is, that it overturns your sense of everything you have ever thought about people. That they can do that. It's so personal, but for them so impersonal. But perhaps that's wrong. On the second night, when the same four came, knowing I could speak Russian, they asked me if I was married and tried to flirt with me. You've read what I wrote. Then the next group found me.”

She shut her eyes.

“It makes you think we women were always just things.”

George felt a sting of anguish. Did she have this thought about him, about Werner?

“It doesn't leave you,” she said. “After everything, then this. I don't sleep much — images, nightmares. The world in confusion.”

George waited, imagining her pain.

“What will you do now?” he said.

“I'm not sure I'll do anything. The fantasy has collapsed.”

”You mean Germany?”

“A shadow passed across the face of the sun.”

“What, then?”

“Civil society needs to be sustained by its citizens. Some proportion of the population, maybe five or ten percent, are thugs. We handed society over to them. Even with the first war, I'd thought that civilization goes on.”

“I know.”

“Now my parents and my brother are dead,” she said. “I've had people be cruel to me because I didn't matter to them. I've been cruel to people who didn't matter to me.”

George wanted to reach out to touch her arm, but he did not dare.

“Everybody wants us Germans to realize the horror of what we've done,” she said. “Started a war that enveloped the world. Yes we did. Caused the deaths of millions of people. Yes we did. Destroyed any idea of decency for Germany. Yes we did. But I'm in a minority in thinking that.”

“I don't know.”

“It's true. Most people think like Werner. Most people think the idea of a strong and united German people was absolutely right. Unfortunately some things didn't go as well as they were supposed to.”

Coffee came, in a china coffee pot. Surprisingly delicate white cups and saucers were placed carefully on the table, in front of each of them. George poured for them both and then took a sip.

“Excuses,” said Anna. “We should have invaded Russia more quickly. When we reached the outskirts of Moscow, we shouldn't have hesitated. Or we should have tried harder to make peace with the English. Or we shouldn't have declared war on America. Endless we-should-haves.”

“Maybe you shouldn't have invaded Russia.”

“Instead of the should-haves, here we are now. Invaded by Russians and Americans. We'll do better next time. That's what some people think.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I changed my mind twice. Politically, I had been liberal. But not very political … you know that. Germany wasn't able to make democracy work. Then came the Nazis.”

“But that was in 1933. That had happened when we met.”

“You knew me in 1936 and 1937. When the magazine was shut down, I was terribly distressed. That's when I was really undermined. My two closest friends were lost. A project I'd devoted myself to became worthless. I gave in to cowardice.”

“Or prudence.”

“My father told me that our magazine had been lucky. It was to have been closed a year before. A high-up Gestapo officer who knew one of our backers said it was to be closed. Wasteful, full of mistaken ideas. Our backer persuaded him it was harmless.”

George thought back to 1937. “You were already under scrutiny,” he said.

“Then my mother died. Then I got married, and so I started to worry about Werner. I didn't have much left in me. It was best to go along with it all. It seemed overwhelming. And I started to think that if so many people wanted Germany to be strong, why should I know better?”

“Then you changed your mind again?”

George noticed that Anna had not touched her coffee.

“The second change was more devious; but it really was a change,” she said. “It was because of a woman with whom I worked in the medical publishing house, Ilse. We became close, and one day, in the summer of 1943, she told me she was Jewish. She had changed her name. She had been able to get papers. She kept working in order to give money to an underground organization.”

“She told you this.”

“We were careful about our friendship. We didn't tell anyone. But we met frequently. She knew that Jews had been forced into a ghetto in Warsaw and then massacred. She knew about the death camps.”

“Did many people know?”

“Men in the army came home on leave from Poland. They knew. Anyone with a radio who tuned in to the BBC knew. The BBC talked about the gas chambers, and what was being done to the Jews. A lot of people listened at one time or another.”

Anna was silent, as if reflecting.

“By then it was clear to everyone that the invasion of Russia had been a disaster,” she said. “Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers — our brothers and friends — killed in Stalingrad. Defeated. Then, with the Americans against us as well …”

“You only had to look at a map.”

“Germany surrounded by Russia, Britain, and America. Anyone could see we were going to lose. The Italians realized it and had Mussolini arrested. Every general must have known it. At some level we all knew it.”

“But no one said anything?”

“Defeatism was punished. People knew they'd be sent to a concentration camp. But that wasn't the issue.”

“What was the issue?”

“The issue was, What's the alternative? No one was going to say, ‘All right then, let's give up and stop fighting. We surrender.' Hitler wasn't going to say that. We'd committed ourselves. There was no alternative.”

“You joined the underground?”

“If I had, I would have retained some self-respect. I would be different than I am today. I wasn't brave enough. Do you know about the White Rose?”

“What's that?”

“A group of students in Munich, led by Hans Scholl and his sister, Sophie Scholl. They started distributing leaflets in 1942, trying to organize resistance to Hitler, whom they recognized as a criminal surrounded by bootlickers who had drugged the German people and isolated us from the rest of Europe.”

“I haven't heard of them.”

“They were students. In their twenties. They put out six editions of their leaflets. They had a duplicating machine and were able to distribute a few hundred of each edition to start with. Our office has copies. The first leaflet quotes Schiller and Goethe. The second gives news of three hundred thousand Jews murdered in Poland. The sixth says that Hitler sacrificed three hundred and thirty thousand German soldiers at Stalingrad.”

“These leaflets are known now?”

“I found out about them in 1943, at the time I was friendly with Ilse. The British and Americans got hold of the leaflets and made copies and dropped them from planes in the tens of thousands, all over Germany. They are the kind of thing I'm collecting information about.”

“And you'll publish the information?”

“I should have done what the Scholls did. I knew people from when we had the magazine, reliable people. I should have got a group together, discussed with them what to do, distributed leaflets perhaps. I knew about putting out printed matter. Tell people about the death camps. Even those army officers could rebel. Why couldn't I? No backbone. The Scholls were an example we should all have followed.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were arrested, of course, and guillotined.”

“You're saying you would have preferred that?”

“If you knew me, you would not ask.”

George felt stung by this reply. He did not know what to say.

“Someone must have given Ilse away. One day, in early 1944, the Gestapo came. It was the last we heard of her. Because I'd worked with her, there was banging on my door one night.”

“You were arrested?”

“Taken for questioning. They didn't know anything about me. I didn't know anything about Ilse's organization. Even though I've got dark hair, so has Hitler. I convinced them that I knew Ilse only at work, not personally.”

“Were you tortured?”

“Held until the following night. I have an Ancestral Certificate. You can scarcely have a more German ancestry than me.”

“You kept working?”

“I tried to find out what happened to Ilse. I dared not ask too many people. I think she was taken to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz.”

George waited.

“My actions didn't change. Now I felt tortured, every day, within myself, by how wrong I had been to go along with it. I wondered how I was going to convince Werner that we had all been so wrong. It didn't come to that.”

“You didn't see him?”

“I saw him just before Ilse was arrested. I knew enough not to say anything to him about Ilse being Jewish. After that, I didn't see him until the war was over. Then of course … I don't know why I say ‘of course.'”

“He seems attached to his beliefs.”

“Beliefs can be sustaining. When the Allied bombers came, I thought it served us right. A lot of people knew what we'd done, what we'd done to the Jews. I think many of them felt the same.”

“People felt guilty?”

“Their houses and livelihoods were destroyed. Why do you think no one says very much? Why don't people feel aggrieved?”

“About the bombing, you mean.”

“I would have deserved the bombs, but they didn't get me. I was annihilated from within.”

“In the middle of 1944, with the Normandy invasions,” said George, “we were advancing on one side and the Russians on the other. Didn't people realize what the Nazis had brought them to?”

“‘Better a Russki on top than a Yank overhead.' That's what we used to say. We got both.”

“In your diary … I can't imagine how you kept going. If you didn't feel part of the national purpose.”

“I thought of Werner. I thought of you sometimes. I thought if I could survive and make contact again with people I loved.”

“You did survive. We have made contact.”

“I didn't imagine everything inside being demolished. The ones who will survive are those who believed that it was the right thing to do, believed that softness is despicable, that the mentally retarded undermined our racial purity, that Jews and Communists threatened our way of life. They are things to hold on to. They're not difficult.”

“Their simplicity is part of the appeal.”

“It wasn't Jews or Communists that people actually knew. For most people, it was theoretical Jews and Communists at whom one must shake the fist. We must be the German Volk.”

George did not know what to say.

“For the Gestapo, it wasn't theoretical. They sought out actual Jews, actual Communists, actual Social Democrats, actual homosexuals…What was despicable was that I kept earning my wages. I kept turning the handle of the racial hygiene presses. Have you read that stuff?”

“I haven't.”

“Medicine was taken over by it. It stopped being medicine. It became racial medicine. I wondered, sometimes, what you would have made of it if you'd practised here in Germany.”

“Racial medicine?”

“It wasn't until I became close to Ilse that I started properly to realize what I had been doing.”

“You mean when you were working for the medical publisher?”

“You know when the Russians crossed the border into Germany — think of all those boys who were peasants — they were astounded to find how prosperous the country was. They couldn't understand why a nation that had everything would invade a nation that had almost nothing.”