Potsdam Station (4 page)

She hoped he still felt that way, that the war hadn’t changed him too much. That he would still recognise her.

She remembered a trip to the Zoo with him and Paul. It had been one of those spring days when everything seemed right with the world, even with the Nazis in power. Paul had only been about seven, so it must have been early in their love affair. The three of them had clambered aboard the same elephant, and clung to each other as it lumbered along the wide path between the iron cages…

She woke suddenly, thinking she’d heard a noise outside. There were no lights, no banging – it must have been an animal, perhaps a fox who frequented the cottage and had suddenly scented its human occupant. She hurriedly used her flashlight to check her watch. It was almost two o’clock. Another half-hour and she would have been late for the rendezvous. How could she have been so careless?

There were no moving shadows on the wall, no distant thunder – the air raid had ended. Outside the fires raised by the bombing were reflected in the clouds, casting the world in an orange glow. She selfishly hoped that her own building had been spared – finding new accommodation with her current identity papers shouldn’t prove too difficult, but any contact with the authorities involved some sort of risk.

It was cold, and she could feel the damp of the cottage in her bones. She thought about using the outside toilet, but a memory of dense cobwebs persuaded her to squat down in the garden. She was almost forty years old, but spiders still frightened her more than the Gestapo.

She decided to get going. There were only two kilometres to walk, along an easy-to-follow path, but it would be prudent to reach her destination early, and give herself the chance of sizing up the situation from a distance.

Walking as quietly as she could, she followed the path around the northern shore of the lake and up into the woods. The rendezvous point was a designated picnic area close to, but above, the road from Frohnau to Bergfelde. As she and Ali had discovered at the weekend, it had several wooden benches and tables, along with a board bearing faded pictures of animal life and stern warnings against dropping litter. Engraved arrows on a plinth directed viewers towards prominent landmarks of the distant capital, and one recent visitor had brought the display up to date by scratching ‘ruins of’ in front of several names.

Effi approached the area with extreme caution. No lights were visible, which was as it should be. She thought she heard murmurs of conversation, but was far from sure.

She worked her way off the path and through the trees, grateful for the masking effect of a noisy breeze as she got closer to the edge of the clearing. Stopping, she thought she could make out several figures, some standing, some sitting at one of the picnic tables. Another few metres and she was sure. There were six of them.

They looked innocent enough, but that was the mistake tigers made about staked-out goats.

She told herself that the person or persons who had brought them would still be watching from hiding, if only to confirm her own arrival. She would not see them, and they would only see her from a distance – Aslund had a keen appreciation of cell structures and the security they provided. Which was why he wanted her to take the group from here to the train, to provide a cut-out between his organisation in the city and the railwaymen.

It was always possible that the initial escorts had been arrested en route, their places taken by Gestapo agents. If so, the latter would be close by, watching and waiting for Effi to reveal and condemn herself.

She forced herself to wait a little longer. As she strained ears and eyes for sign of any other watchers, one of the figures at the table suddenly got to his feet and stretched. ‘I imagine many ways in which it would all end,’ he said to his companions, ‘but I never considered a midnight picnic.’

The other men laughed, removing Effi’s suspicions. These men had not been brought by the Gestapo.

She took a deep breath and strode out of the trees. The six men, hardly surprisingly, all jumped at her sudden appearance.

‘I am your guide,’ she said softly. ‘We have about two kilometres to walk, and I want you to follow me in single file. Move as quietly as you can. And please, no talking.’

They did as they were told.

She led them back down the path she had taken, turning off onto another after two hundred metres. This new path led north, climbing into the trees and around the side of a low hill. Effi doubted whether the paths in this wood saw much traffic anymore, but
Hitlerjugend
playing soldiers had infested all woods within easy reach of the capital until the end of 1942, and nature had not yet succeeded in erasing all proof of their perambulations. This path was still easy to follow.

An occasional noise, probably an animal evading their passage, broke through the constant swish of the wind in the trees, and Effi could feel the nervousness of those behind her. She had no idea how far they had already travelled, or how much they knew of where they were going. She remembered her own aborted flight from Germany three years earlier, and the sense of utter powerlessness she had felt in the hands of those trying to help her. All that waiting, all that tension.

It was easier in motion. She could hear the heavy breathing of the men behind her, could imagine the hope at war with the fear. A few more days and their fate would be decided – sanctuary in Sweden or some impromptu execution yard.

They walked steadily on through the rustling forest. A barely risen moon was soon ghosting the tops of the trees, and by the time they emerged above the cutting it was high enough to reflect off the receding rails. These stretched straight as arrows in both directions: south-east towards Berlin, north-west towards the Baltic coast.

She turned to the six fugitives, and saw them properly for the first time. Three were in their forties or older, all wearing the sort of suits and shirts with high collars which the old upper class favoured. Army politicals, Effi thought, potential victims of the never-ending hunt for anyone even remotely involved in the previous summer’s plot to kill the Führer. The Reich might be on its last legs, but Hitler was determined that all his German enemies should die before he did.

The other three were younger, wearing cheaper, less formal clothes. Jews, Effi guessed, from the look of two of them. She realised with a shock that she recognised one man. A year or more ago, he had spent a night at the apartment.

His eyes told her the recognition was mutual, which boded anything but good. But there was nothing she could do about it now.

‘I’m leaving you here,’ she said, raising a hand to still the sudden alarm in six pairs of eyes. ‘See the railwaymen’s hut down there?’ she added. ‘Wait behind it. The train will stop, someone will come and get you, show you where to get on.’

‘When is it due?’ one man asked.

‘Soon,’ Effi told him. ‘In the next half-hour.’

‘When does it get light?’ another voice asked.

‘Not for another three hours,’ one of his companions told him.

‘Okay, good luck,’ Effi said, turning away.

‘Thank you,’ several voices murmured after her.

It felt wrong leaving them to fend for themselves, but Aslund had insisted that she retrace their steps as quickly as possible, and make sure they were not being followed. If they were, she was supposed to lead the pursuit off in a safe direction. Safe, that is, for everyone but herself.

With the pale light of the half-moon suffusing the trees, without her charges to worry about, she was able to walk much faster, and as her fears of meeting the enemy began to fade, so her progress through the forest began to feel almost exhilarating. She felt like bursting into song, but managed to restrain herself. There’d be plenty of time for singing when the war was over.

And then, somewhere up ahead, she heard the dog bark.

At this point the path was curving down from the crest of a low ridge. She scanned the darkness below, searching for lights or movement in the tangle of trees.

A second round of barking sounded different. Was there more than one dog, or was that just her imagination?

A light – maybe lights – flickered in the distance. They were several hundred metres away, she thought, though it was difficult to judge distance. Far enough in any case that she heard no voices or footfalls.

What should she do? If it was the Gestapo, then the dog or dogs would be following their scent. There was no way she could erase it, but she could add another trail by moving away from the path. In fact that was all she could do – she certainly couldn’t go forward or back. Without further thought, she left the path and hurried into the trees, moving fast as she could across the broken slope. The ground beneath the trees was spongy enough to absorb the sound of her passage, and no more barks broke through the background swish of the breeze. When she stopped after several minutes and took a long look back, there was no sign of lights.

Had they simply gone on down the path? And if so, would they reach the cutting ahead of the train? She hadn’t heard the latter, but it should have arrived by now.

It was out of her hands. ‘Save yourself, Effi,’ she murmured, and pressed on. A few minutes later she stumbled into a narrow ditch. There was water at the bottom – not much of it to be sure, but it was trickling down, and presumably in the direction of the lake. She followed it down the slope for what seemed an eternity, casting the occasional anxious glance back over her shoulder, but there was no sign of a pursuit. She began to hope she had imagined it. Could the lights and the barking have come from something as innocent as a woodsman and his dog? Did such people still exist in the Third Reich? It was possible. It often felt as if all normal life had been consumed by the war, but things kept popping up to prove the opposite.

She suddenly found herself on the path which ran around the lake, no more than a couple of hundred metres from the borrowed cottage. Paul would have been proud of her, she thought, remembering the boy’s own joy at winning a
Hitlerjugend
orientation exercise on a pre-war weekend. She felt pretty proud of herself.

There were no indications that the cottage had received any visitors. She ate one of the rolls she’d brought with her, drank some of the water, and tried to decide on a course of action. It wasn’t five o’clock yet, which meant another two hours of darkness. Should she stay or go? She had counted on returning to Berlin around 8 am, and hadn’t bothered to note the time of the first train – if she walked back to Frohnau station now she might find herself alone – and conspicuous – on an empty platform. Staying put for another couple of hours seemed, on balance, slightly less fraught with danger. She settled down to wait for dawn, wishing she knew whether or not the six men had caught their train. If they had, she should be safe for the night. If they hadn’t, someone would soon be talking.

Once again, she found herself waking from an unexpected sleep. This time it was probably the sunlight that woke her – it was almost eight o’clock. She went outside to have a pee, only to hear the sound of male voices in the distance. And a barking dog. They were coming from the direction of Frohnau.

Should she run? If they were looking for her, then the station would be covered in any case. And the dogs would surely track her down if she went back into the woods. Her only hope was to bluff it out.

She needed to be sure of her facts. Hurrying back inside, she went straight to the drawer where she and Ali had found the letters. Two were addressed to Harald and Maria Widmann and bore Heidelberg postmarks. Inside both were a few dutiful lines from ‘your loving son, Hartmut’. He was allegedly ‘working hard’, presumably at his studies. The third was a bill for boat repairs, addressed only to Herr Widmann.

She repeated the names out loud, then closed the drawer and took a quick look along the shelf of mouldering books. There were a couple by Karl May, and several books on birds and fishing.

The voices were outside the cottage now. She stood still, not wishing to gave away her presence, hoping they would walk on by.

No such luck. ‘Check inside,’ someone said.

She walked to the doorway and cried out ‘good morning’, as if overjoyed to meet a posse of passing strangers. The man coming towards her, and two of those remaining on the lakeside path, were wearing light blue-grey
Bahnschutzpolizei
uniforms; the man in charge was wearing the long leather coat beloved of the Gestapo. He walked slowly towards her, enjoying each step.

‘Is something wrong?’ Effi asked innocently.

‘Who are you, Madame? Where are your papers?’

Effi took them from her bag and passed them over.

‘Erna von Freiwald,’ he read aloud, with a slight, but unmistakable hint of disdain for the ‘von.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed cheerfully.

‘And what are you doing here, Frau von Freiwald?’

‘Ah,’ Effi said. ‘This is slightly embarrassing.’

‘Yes?’

‘This cottage is owned by old friends of mine. My late husband and I used to visit them before the war. Rainer was a keen fisherman, like Harald. They used to spend whole nights out on the lake, and Maria and I would talk…’

‘Your social life before the war does not interest me. What are you doing here now?’

‘I came to see if I could stay here, away from the bombing. It’s getting so bad in the city, and, well, I came up here last night. The train took forever, and I had trouble finding the cottage after all these years, and by the time I did it was too late to go back. So I stayed the night. I was just getting ready to leave when you arrived.’