Potsdam Station (17 page)

No shells were falling around them now, but all knew the reprieve was temporary. They ate their breakfasts mostly in silence, thinking ahead to the moment when the tanks would appear in their sights. Not for the first time, Paul felt an intense need to be moving. He could understand why people in the rear lines sometimes ran screaming towards the front, eager to settle things once and for all.

Soon after five-thirty, nature’s light began seeping into the sky, and by six the sun was rising above the eastern horizon, illuminating a world of drifting black smoke. Low-flying Soviet fighters were soon whizzing in and out of the man-made clouds, but clearly found it hard to pick out targets on the ground. A horse-drawn ambulance cart hurried by on the Seelow-Diedersdorf road, headed for the aid stations farther back. The first of many, Paul thought.

There were too many ways to be killed, and too many hours in the day. Soon after two o’clock a shell suddenly struck the upper trunk of a tree nearby, setting it ablaze. As they all scrambled for the shelter of the front walls, other shells followed, straddling and surrounding their emplacements without ever hitting them, like some malign god intent on scaring them half to death before finishing them off. The noise and heat were so intense that Neumaier started screaming abuse at the Soviet gunners. Haaf, he noticed, had tears streaming down his adolescent face.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shelling stopped, and the war was once again several kilometres distant.

‘Why don’t you send Haaf back to the command post for our welfare stores?’ Paul suggested to Sergeant Utermann.

‘Does he know the way?’

‘I’ll go with him,’ Hannes volunteered.

Darkness had almost fallen when the pair finally returned, loaded up with cigarettes and other necessities.

‘They’re still handing out
razors
?’ Neumaier expostulated. ‘Who are we supposed to be impressing – fucking Ivan?’ He seemed much better pleased with the chocolate and biscuits in the front line packets.

‘Don’t forget your buttons’ Hannes told him. ‘You wouldn’t want your dick to fall out in Red Square.’

Paul smiled, and stared at his allotment of writing paper. There was no post anymore. Maybe he should start writing war poetry. The other day someone had shown him a poem by Bertolt Brecht, one of his father’s old favourites, a communist writer who’d left Germany when the Nazis came to power. He’d been living in America ever since, but he hadn’t forgotten Hitler or the Wehrmacht. ‘To the German Soldiers in the East’ was the name of the poem Paul had read, and one line had stayed with him: ‘there is no longer a road leading home.’ Perhaps Brecht had meant that they would never see Germany again, in which case he’d been wrong – here they were, defending German soil. But that didn’t matter – there was a bigger truth there, for Paul himself and so many others. They might die in front of Berlin, but even if they survived, the home they had known was gone.

Hannes and Haaf had also brought news. The Russians had lost hundreds of tanks and thousands of men trying to cross the Oderbruch, and the line was still holding. They wouldn’t be coming up the road today.

There was also a Führer Order, which Sergeant Utermann insisted on reading aloud. ‘Berlin remains German,’ it began. ‘Vienna will be German again, and Europe never Russian. Form yourselves into brotherhoods. At this hour the whole German people are looking at you, my East Front warriors, and only hope that through your resolve, your fanaticism, your weapons and your leaders, the Bolshevik onslaught will drown in a sea of blood. The turning point of the war depends upon you.’

Utermann carefully folded the sheet and put it in his breast pocket. ‘East Front warriors,’ he repeated, looking round at the others. ‘He has a way with words.’

‘We mustn’t give up,’ Haaf said earnestly. ‘There’s always hope.’

No there isn’t, Paul thought but refrained from saying.

It was still dark when Effi was woken by Rosa shaking her shoulder and urgently asking: ‘What’s that noise?’

Effi levered herself onto one elbow and listened. There was a dull booming in the distance, a sound neither continuous nor broken, but something between the two. All around the room others were stirring, heads raised in query. ‘It’s the Russians,’ someone said breathlessly.

The news raced around the room, the initial excitement swiftly turning to anxiety. Everyone knew what this meant, that the decision about their own fate had just been brought a whole lot closer. Suddenly the horrors of the present – the hunger, the fear, the living in perpetual limbo – all seemed much more bearable.

About fifteen hours had passed since Effi’s interview with Dobberke, and she hadn’t been summoned to another. She had met a new friend though, a young Jewish woman in her twenties named Nina. Effi had noticed her on the Saturday, a pale, thin, almost catatonic figure sitting in a corner with knees held tight against her chest. But on Sunday a package from the outside world had worked a miracle, turning her into the vivacious and talkative young woman who, that evening, introduced herself to Effi and Rosa. Nina, they learned, had been in hiding since the big round-up of March 1943. She had lived with a gentile friend – the way she talked about the other woman made Effi think they’d been rather more than ‘friends’ – and only been caught when a female
greifer
recognised her from their old school days together. That had been four weeks ago.

That morning, the mood engendered by her friend’s visit was still in evidence. When she, Effi and Johanna discussed the one question occupying every mind in the camp – what would the SS do when the Russians drew near? – Nina was the most optimistic. They would release their prisoners, she thought – what else could they do? The answer to that was depressingly obvious, but neither Effi nor Johanna put it into words. Were there enough of them to kill a thousand Jews, Effi wondered. Or would they just settle for murdering the hundred or so pure Jews in the collection camp? Making those sorts of distinctions with the world crashing down around them seemed utterly absurd, but when had they ever been anything else?

Later that morning, when the latest raid forced everyone down to the basement, she studied Dobberke’s face, hoping for a clue to his intentions. There was none, and when he suddenly glanced in her direction she quickly looked away; she had no desire to provoke another interrogation.

She tried to imagine herself in his situation. He had committed crimes which she hoped the Allies and Russians would consider serious enough to warrant the death penalty. It was often hard to believe that the people bombing Berlin had any sort of moral sense, but surely sending civilians to their death for being members of a particular race would be considered worthy of the ultimate punishment. So Dobberke had to be fearing the worst. Of course, it was possible that he had already decided on suicide – Hitler, she was sure, would take that way out – and, if so, he might well want to take them all with him. But Dobberke hadn’t struck Effi as the suicidal type. And if he wanted to survive he needed to provide his future captors with an ameliorating circumstance or two. Like letting his current charges go.

So maybe Nina was right. As the day wore on Effi felt more optimistic, right up to the moment when two of the Jews from the Lübeck train were escorted through the basement rooms, en route to the cells. The third Jew, the young man who had stayed in Bismarck Strasse, was nowhere to be seen, but one of these recognised her from the night in the forest, the eyes widening in his badly bruised face.

It didn’t matter, she told herself. It was too late in the day for Dobberke and his goons to start investigating individual stories. Whatever the fate awaiting those in their care, it seemed increasingly certain that everyone would share it.

It was long past dark when the chauffeur-driven Ford dropped Russell and Ilya Varennikov outside the NKVD barracks that served as their temporary home. They had done five drops that day, one in the pre-dawn twilight, three in daylight, and one as dusk shaded into night. The first had been the scariest, a long fall through gloom in which distances had been hard to measure, and only a serendipitous patch of bog had saved Russell’s legs from the clumsiness of his landing. The last, darker drop had been easier, the various lights on the ground providing more of a yardstick for judgement, but there was no guarantee of similar assistance in the countryside west of Berlin. A moon might make things easier, but it would also render them more visible. Russell found himself hanging on to the thought that the Soviets really wanted this operation to succeed, and would not be dropping him to a likely death just for the fun of it.

Although he and Varennikov were physically shattered, a day spent falling from the heavens had left them both with an undeniable sense of exhilaration. It had also brought them together, as risk-sharing tended to do. Russell had expected the usual Soviet caution when it came to dealing with foreigners, but Varennikov had been friendly from the start, and now, tucking into a large pile of cabbage and potatoes in the otherwise empty canteen, he was eager to satisfy his curiosity about Russell. How had an American comrade ended up on this mission?

It occurred to Russell that the young scientist might had been primed to ask him questions, but somehow he didn’t think so. And if he had, what did it matter? He gave Varennikov an edited version of the true story – his long career as a foreign correspondent in Germany before and during the war, his eventual escape with Soviet help, his time in America and Britain, his determination to rescue his wife and son in Berlin and his consequent arrival in Moscow. If only it had been that straightforward, he thought to himself in passing.

He expected questions about America and Britain, but Varennikov, like many Soviet citizens, seemed oblivious to the outside world. He also had a wife and son, and pulled two photographs from an inside pocket to prove it. ‘This is Irina,’ he said of the smiling chubby-faced blonde in one snapshot. ‘And this is Yakov,’ he added, offering another of a young boy gripping a large stuffed bear.

‘Where are they?’ Russell asked.

‘In Gorki. That is where I work. My mother is there also. My father and brother were killed by the Nazis in 1941. In the Donbass, where my family comes from. My father and brother were both miners, and my father was a Party official. When the Germans came in 1941 anti-Party elements handed over the list of local Party members, and they were all shot.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Varennikov shrugged. ‘Most Soviet families have such stories to tell.’

‘I know. Yours must have been proud of you. Doing the work you do.’

‘My father was. He used to say that before the Revolution, the sons of miners had no chance of going to university, or of becoming scientists. All such jobs were taken by the sons of the bourgeoisie.’ He gave Russell a smile. ‘I was born the day after the Party seized power in 1917. So my father decided that my life should be like a chronicle of the better world that the Party was creating.’

It was Russell’s turn to smile. ‘And has your life gone well?’

Varennikov missed the hint of irony. ‘Yes, I think so. There have been troubles, setbacks, but we are still going forward.’

‘And were you always interested in atomic physics?’

‘It’s been the most interesting area of research since the mid-thirties, and I… well, I never really considered any other field. The possibilities are so enormous.’

‘And what are you hoping to discover in Berlin?’

‘More pieces of the puzzle. I don’t know – there were so many brilliant German physicists before the war, and if they received enough government backing they should be ahead of us. But they probably didn’t – the Nazis used to describe this whole field as ‘Jewish physics’. Or the German scientists might have refused to work on a bomb, or worked on it without really trying. We don’t know.’

‘How powerful will these bombs be?’ Russell asked, curious as to current Soviet thinking.

‘There’s no obvious limit, but large enough to destroy whole cities.’

‘Dropping them sounds a dangerous business.’

Varennikov smiled. ‘They’ll be dropped from a great height, or attached to rockets. In theory, that is.’

‘And in practice?’

‘Oh, they won’t actually be used. They’ll act as a deterrent, a threat to possible invaders. If we had owned such a bomb in 1941 the Germans would never have dared to invade us. If every country has one, then no one will be able to invade anyone else. The atomic bomb is a weapon for peace, not war.’

‘But…’ Russell began, just as footsteps sounded behind him. The openness of their discussion might, he realised, be somewhat frowned upon in certain quarters.

Varennikov seemed unconcerned by such considerations.. ‘And harnessing atomic power for peaceful purposes will transform the world,’ he continued. ‘Imagine unlimited, virtually free energy. Poverty will become a thing of the past.’

Colonel Nikoladze sat down beside the physicist.

‘We’re imagining a better world,’ Russell told him.

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Nikoladze replied. He didn’t care what they were talking about, Russell realised with a sinking heart. Varennikov could tell him that Stalin was partial to goats, and no one would protest. They hadn’t even forbidden him from writing about the mission once the war was over. Why bother when he wouldn’t be around?