Shining Through (52 page)

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B
ombs scared me as much as the Gestapo. Maybe more, because at least with the Germans I had a chance to use whatever wits I had to save my own life. But when the Russians, and then the RAF Bomber Command, flew over Berlin and dropped a thousand tons of bombs in one day, being clever didn’t help.

Cowering in an air raid shelter was about all I could do.

The bombing began to grow in fierceness in the winter I first came to Berlin, 1942—43, but most of it was in the eastern part of the city, near the airport, and farther north, aimed at the tank and munitions factories. Of course I heard it. At night I’d lie in bed on the top floor of the villa in Dahlem and hear—even feel—low booms; if I’d been in my bed in Ridgewood, I could have convinced myself it was a Mack truck backfiring just across the borough line in Bushwick.

By the time I left Konrad Friedrichs, I’d learned to sleep through the attacks. Now and then, I’d wake up startled, my forehead and neck all sweaty, at the sound of the “all clear”

whistle, but that wasn’t exactly a shocking occurrence; sweet dreams didn’t come in Germany. Still, throughout that winter, a person—like a Hedwig—could live in luxurious suburban safety and only have to put up with a little disturbing background noise…and the strange red haze that hovered over the city each sunrise.

Not that Hedwig ever saw a sunrise after the milk, honey and touch of brandy—a touch big enough to knock out a hippopot-amus—I brought upstairs to her every night. She 386

SHINING THROUGH / 387

forgot about her periods completely; now she just whined all the time about her violent headaches. A terrible thing to do to a fellow human being, right? Making some miserable, wretched wreck of a woman drunk every night. Maybe turning her into an alcoholic. Wasn’t it awful? Actually, it didn’t bother me one bit.

So Hedwig slept through the winter air raids, and the spring ones too. While the SS and the police were executing
Fabrik
Aktion
, rounding up Jews—maybe my two cousins with the quivering, spidery handwriting—and shipping them east, she snored.

All that spring, I kept remembering what Edward had said about Germany being hell. I wanted so much to talk to him about it, tell him he was right, that hell wasn’t just here in Berlin, with its red sky. This was only headquarters. Hell was where the gas chambers were, with prussic acid filling the lungs of silly old ladies who complained about their dentures. And the tiny lungs of babies.

I wondered if the Germans had been as efficient as they’d hoped to be with their construction. Probably. You couldn’t get a goddamn cast-iron skillet in the whole city of Berlin, but boy, were they productive when it came to murdering Jews.

Judenrein
. I’d heard it six or seven times from the dining room.

Jew-free. The ideal, purified German state that Horst with his satin vests and pimples dreamed of: a perfect Reich for perfect Aryans like him and Hedwig.

The bombing stayed normal all summer. Well, if you lose electricity, gas and water for weeks at a time, life isn’t normal.

But at the villa, where the water truck pulled up to the curb, special door-to-door Nazi VIP service, where Horst came home with boxes of candles every night, life was tolerable.

Of course, Hedwig kept whining: Cold potato salad and sausage
again?
War is heck, Hedwig.

I walked through Berlin. There were no cordoned-off streets anymore with Gestapo and Wehrmacht guards making sure you didn’t see the holes where houses used to be.

388 / SUSAN ISAACS

You can’t hide half a city. Buildings were blasted to rubble, dust.

Now and then you’d come upon just a wall standing, looking like the pictures you see of movie scenery in
Life
—real fronts of Wild West bars or candy stores, but from the side, flat and false.

I tried not to think of home. New York—rude, pushy, funny:

“Huh, lady? Whadaya want?” Even Washington—clean, serious, courtly: “May I help you, ma’am?” Quit it, I told myself. Don’t think of life when you’re in the land of the dead.

Outside Rolf’s fish store, spread-out newspapers were held down by bricks. (Bricks made great paperweights, and the city had mountains of paperweights.) You were supposed to wipe your shoes on the usual phonied-up casualty lists or the radio listings, to get the shards of window glass out of the soles before you went inside. Who could blame them? The city was made of glass. The farther east you walked on Kurfürstendamm, the less you could ignore the crunch-crunch of glass under your feet; the sidewalk became a dazzling, rough, crackling-loud pathway.

You’d tread carefully, farther on, and you’d meet up with dazed strangers, who kept pointing: I live in that apartment over there—four rooms. Except they were pointing at air. People wore bandages, eye patches, slings, casts. It was horrible. People wandered around in the early morning, still bleeding from the night before.

Did I feel sorry for them? You’ve got to be paralyzed not to feel some pity for an old man who’s standing and crying by a pile of rubble, and you see a pair of legs sticking out from under all the pulverized mortar and bricks. His wife’s legs, covered with heavy elastic stockings, the kind to help with circulation problems; she probably hadn’t had time to find her shoes. And you’d have to be numb not to feel for the bewildered little kids who kept calling for their dogs.

Every time I heard the unmistakable sound of an RAF Mosqui-to coming close—and you knew what was coming before the

“take cover” whistle blew—I’d rush with the crowds, breathless, panicked, to find the nearest bomb shel-SHINING THROUGH / 389

ter. But at the same exact minute when my heart was thudding and my mouth was dry with terror, I wanted to yell, Get ’em!

Get ’em! More! More! More!

So did I feel sorry for them? These people huddled around me in an underground station or the basement of a fruit store were the same people who screamed with pride when Hitler told them of their destiny. I’d heard their screams on the radio in Ridgewood, way back in the early thirties.

Or if they weren’t the screamers, they were the voters: Cast your ballot for the man who’ll show the Slav and Czech scum just what German power really is!

And if they weren’t the voters, they were the watchers. They watched the torchlight parades. They watched the soldiers march, the tanks and cannons roll down the street, and they cheered.

They watched their neighbors lose their right to vote, their businesses, their citizenship, their houses and their lives. Maybe they didn’t cheer; maybe they said “Too bad” when the Gestapo came to get Liesl and Hannah—but not too loud; someone might hear them.

They had welcomed the devil, or at least didn’t say, Hey, get out of here, and he had set up business right smack in the middle of town. So let the good people of Berlin get a little taste of what hell was like. And the answer is no, I wasn’t sorry.

I lost all sense of time. I was in Berlin forever. The bombing would just keep getting heavier until one day there would be nothing to bomb anymore. November 1943, a whole year after I arrived, was the last time I knew whether it was a Tuesday or a Friday. There were fires burning all the time in the city that month, immense fires; the British had bombed Berlin’s supply of coal, and nearly all the fuel for winter was in flames. I’d come back to the villa and my hair would have patches of black: the huge pieces of soot that drifted down all over the city.

By December, or it may have been February 1944…It was winter, anyway, and people were chopping down trees in the Grunewald to burn to keep from freezing. That’s when 390 / SUSAN ISAACS

I lost track of the month. But somewhere in that time, the villa was hit. I could hear it coming. Walking through the city, I’d learned to judge, just by the pitch of the whistle a bomb makes, about where it was going to land.

At ten at night, I heard the whistle. I threw off my blanket, ran into the hall and screamed for Else and Dagmar. Else bolted out of her room, and together we ran down to the next floor and banged on Hedwig’s door. But the bomb exploded before I could even shout, Wake up, you imbecile.

We were thrown to the floor. It wasn’t a direct hit, because we would have been dead. But close. Even as I heard the blast, I felt the violent change in the air pressure. Oh, dear God! My chest kept moving in and out, but I couldn’t breathe. It was like my lungs had been yanked out.

And then it was over. Absolute quiet. We pulled ourselves up, to discover that no one in the house had been killed. Horst wasn’t even home; he was at the Philharmonic, getting culture.

Of all of us, Dagmar suffered the worst. She’d just made it out of her bedroom when the door of the bathroom down the hall was ripped off its hinges; it went flying past her, but it managed to break her shoulder, her arm and a couple of ribs.

Else and I, lying on our stomachs, hands over our heads, were cut by slivers of flying glass. Horrible, because later you could feel them under your skin, but you couldn’t see them, much less get them out. And most of them were in my back, so every time I turned or bent over, I got forty or fifty stabs of pain.

What happened to Hedwig was that her antique clothes cabinet fell down and all her blue robes spilled down on the floor.

So it didn’t matter one bit what month it was, because when you alternate between being resigned to death and trembling uncontrollably at the thought, it doesn’t really matter if it’s Friday, March 10, 1944, or not.

When I wasn’t thinking about death, I was thinking about my job—both jobs. It was getting harder to find food, even for Horst, and I worried that he’d decide he didn’t need me, SHINING THROUGH / 391

that Hedwig could slice a
Kochwurst
as well as I could. So far, I’d gotten reprieve after reprieve; the gas line was reconnected, so the oven worked; then someone in the foreign office flew back from Paris and gave Horst veal. So much veal! He and his friends sucked up veal roasts and veal stews and veal fricassees for a couple of weeks.

On the days I thought my job was pretty safe, I worried about the villa. Forget being a cook. I was also a spy. What if they scored a direct hit and bombed Horst’s study? Then he’d have to work nights at the foreign office, and I’d be stuck in a Nazi kitchen, up to my ears in
Gefüllter Fasan
.

One of those nights in ’44, toward the end of winter, wrapped up in a blanket on the cold floor of the basement, waiting for a raid that never happened, I let go of the present and thought, for a second, about going home. I realized that as much as I ached to hear English and to be back in New York, I had no one to go back to. Somewhere at OSS Training School, in a small brown envelope in a metal cabinet, was my wedding ring.

Suddenly, it hit me that I hadn’t thought of John for weeks—maybe months. I knew then, for sure, that the ring was going to wind up in some other cabinet, in the Unclaimed Property Office. It would stay there forever. I didn’t want it, not even as a souvenir to stick in the drawer next to my 1939

World’s Fair official embroidered handkerchief.

So, I thought, here are my choices: I would die, courtesy of a British bomb or German prussic acid; Germany would win the war and I’d be stuck as a cook for the Dreschers the rest of my life; or the Allies would win, and somehow, even if it took years, I’d have a shot at getting
home
.

So what if there was no one to go home to? Even if I had to start my life all over again, slinging hash in a diner in Long Island City or working for some fat-mouth lawyer on Court Street in Brooklyn, I wanted to be back in New York more than anything else.

But I didn’t want to think about it too much, to picture lying on the sand in Rockaway, or drinking a chocolate malted, or ever really—being now, at last, at age thirty-five, 392 / SUSAN ISAACS

of sound mind—finding my one true love. Because if it came down to dying, unfulfilled dreams would make death hurt even more. I’d rather check out with a few bittersweet memories: of John, of at least not dying an old maid, and of having done a good turn for the red, white and blue. I had enough regrets, like not seeing my mother before she died. And not, all those years, ever having had the guts to say, Hey, you want to know what kind of a name Voss is? It’s Jewish. I hadn’t even had the courage to admit it to Edward, the one person who knew me better than anyone, and knew the truth.

Edward Leland was my biggest regret. I’d slammed the door on that one forever by not resolving our fight, and by leaving that cold, typed letter on his desk: I quit. Then, just to make sure there was nothing to go back to, I’d burned my one last bridge by sneaking behind his back to Norman Weekes. So there was no chance of regaining the best…what? Friendship? Association? The best connection I had ever had. But, I thought, life is full of regrets. And I’ll take life any way I can get it.

Because, you see, deep down I knew we were going to win the war. It was on every face I saw in the street, in the snappiness of Rolf’s walk as he crossed from one side of the fish store to the other, in the ever-more-downward slump of Horst’s shoulders. Sure, Berliners picked themselves up and tried to put as many pieces together as they could, but there was none of that energy, none of that quiet spirit, none of that zest for life I’d heard in British voices over the radio in those days back in 1940, during the Battle of Britain. The Germans were losers—and they knew it.

Hedwig took to bed almost permanently in the early spring of 1944, and while that may sound as if it would have been a boon for me, it was really a disaster. I found myself in the exact position I’d been in when she was sniveling away in the parlor; exposed. From her bedroom, she had a panoramic view of the linen closet out in the hall. And I SHINING THROUGH / 393

couldn’t rely on her stupors: One minute she’d be snoring, an awful sound, as if she was being forced to gargle with some hideous-tasting mouthwash. And then, just as I put my hand on the door handle of the linen closet, she’d call, “Lina! My milk!”

“I was coming to see if you were ready for it, Madam.”