Underground in Berlin (17 page)

After he had hung up, I said anxiously, ‘It’s my married name that’s Koch, at least in my papers – so my father can’t be called Koch, can he?’

‘Oh, my God, how naïve you are,’ he said. ‘It’s not a question of checking your papers. The whole point is to act from the first in such a way that no one asks about them.’

Then he sent me out. I sat down beside my unfortunate lover Mitko. It was odd, but at that moment I felt, for the first time, that Goll was right. There was no future in my relationship with Mitko. It had been a really enchanting, spring-like love affair, but a flash in the pan. Now it was burning out, and soon there would be nothing left of it but a little heap of ashes.

After some time Goll called me into his room again. ‘Go back to the hotel,’ he said, ‘but you can go as a free woman. Walk about all you like. Tomorrow or the day after I’ll pick you up in a car. You will get a genuine German passport on trust. It will stand up to any amount of checking, but it will be marked
Valid for Return to Germany Only
.’

He also explained the course that this return journey was to take: I would go by ship from Lom on the Danube to Vienna, by way of Budapest. He would discover in good time whether there was a warrant out for my arrest in Germany. If there was, he would send me a telegram to the ship containing some innocuous message. ‘If you get a telegram, never mind what it says, leave the ship in Budapest. Pick up a shopping basket, wait around by the shipboard galley, and leave the ship with the crew.’ He gave me a sealed envelope. ‘Open this only if you have to disembark in Budapest, and go to the address you will find inside. They will help you there. If you don’t receive a telegram, stay on board and burn this envelope. Give me your word of honour that you will.’

I promised, solemnly assuring him that I was absolutely reliable. One or two days later he drove me to the German embassy in Sofia. Once again I had to wait while he disappeared into the back rooms. When he came out, he said in a loud voice, ‘Having known your family for so many years, I’ve been able to guarantee your identity as Johanna Koch. Get your marriage certificate in order, and then you can legally come back to Bulgaria. But for now my office will pay your passage back to Germany. Good luck, and I hope we meet again.’ I didn’t even have a chance to thank him properly.

I was given my passport by a very nice young woman who volubly wished me luck and all good fortune. She herself was married to a Bulgarian, she told me, and he was a wonderful man. She hoped I would succeed in marrying my own Bulgarian fiancé. As she talked, she caressed both my arms.

*

Mitko went as far as Lom with me. Once again we stayed in a hotel there and ate the excellent Bulgarian grapes. Once again Mitko was my lover, a delicately built man with fairy-tale colouring, white as snow, red as blood and black as ebony, and with an enchantingly mellifluous voice. But now I clearly felt how different we were. He often sang a German hit song that was all the rage on the radio in Berlin, a terribly sentimental piece – and when it turned out that he had misquoted the line
Schenk mir dein Löchlein, Maria
, substituting
Löchlein
[little hole] for
Lächeln
[smile], I finally realised that yes, it had been a nice love affair, but it was just as well that it was over now.

After one or two days in Lom, Mitko asked me to understand that he couldn’t stay any longer. He had been in Bulgaria for weeks, he said, and hadn’t yet even been in touch with his parents. He was going back to his village, but he left me all the money he still had. It was a tearful farewell. We embraced, wept together, and encouraged each other to hope that we would meet again some day. But we never did.

Lom was a miserable place. If there were any sights worth seeing there, I didn’t discover them. And once Mitko had left, there was no one to show them to me.

All the same, I tried to delay my journey. Every day that I didn’t spend in Berlin, I thought, was another day in safety, a day closer to the end of the war. I thought up all kinds of reasons why I had to stay in Bulgaria. The man organising shipments from Lom was German. He sat at a little table in the street, drawing up passenger lists. I offered to certify that I hadn’t yet finished a course of medical treatment. I said I had to wait for a date to appear in a law court. None of it was any good. ‘You’re being thrown out,’ he said abruptly. ‘That’s what it says in your passport.’

Before giving up I made one last try. ‘Then I’ll have to leave without my winter coat, what a nuisance! I left it in Tarnovo,’ I said miserably. ‘They were going to send it on here in a parcel.’ That did work. The man began shaking dramatically, a facetious imitation of someone shuddering with cold. It was mid-October, and he obviously regarded Prussia as something like East Siberia. ‘Prussia without a winter coat?’ he said. ‘Dear me, that won’t do. You can stay here another ten days.’ He crossed my name off one list and put it on another.

So I had gained a little time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Since I had no occupation, I just wandered round the place. As I did so I noticed a large group of Greek men who looked lost and impoverished, and were probably foreign workers bound for Germany.

Once an elderly Hungarian officer spoke to me. ‘You speak German? May I invite you to take a glass of wine with me?’ I accepted the invitation, and soon regretted it, because he was dreadfully arrogant. We drank wine together for five or six evenings running. He was always making remarks such as, ‘Asia begins beyond Budapest.’ He was also a traditional anti-Semite, well informed about the military situation. He told me, ‘We shall win, you know. But I’m aware how hard it will really be; I expect a catastrophe.’

I could no longer restrain myself. I answered in such a loud voice that people at the nearby tables turned to look at us. ‘I don’t expect any catastrophe. I’m firmly convinced that the just cause will win.’

He looked at me foolishly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Are you in any doubt of what the just cause is? Do you need such things explained to you?’ I retorted defiantly.

To that, he said, ‘Something about you strikes me as odd. The extent of your education compared to your financial means, your putting up here in the cheapest accommodation and your generally poor appearance – none of it really fits together.’

I told him some story about a large suitcase that had gone astray. Once again I had been taught a lesson: I must be more careful. This man could have been dangerous to me. Fortunately he was leaving next day.

At the end of October I left Lom on the ship. Because it had got around that I spoke some Bulgarian, I was asked to interpret. There were many Bulgarians on board who didn’t speak a word of German. It was only a case of giving them simple instructions such as where to go on the ship. But I was proud that I could make myself useful.

A woman who was one of the organisers told the man in charge of this transport about me, and he wanted us to meet. He sat beside me on a bench on deck. It was fine weather, and we saw the landscape passing by. He was bored, hoped to get some amusement from our conversation, and kept laughing cheerfully. Then he asked why, as a citizen of the German Reich, I was being sent back from Bulgaria. I told him the usual story – I had been planning to marry a Bulgarian, but had left Germany in too much of a hurry and without the necessary papers.

‘Would you be kind enough to show me your papers?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never seen a passport in which a German citizen is obliged to leave the country, although there is a guarantee of her identity.’ Naturally I was alarmed. I opened my bag, meaning to show him my identity card first, but I found that I had my passport in my hand. I noticed my mistake too late. Put the passport back in the bag and take out the identity card? That would have looked suspicious.

The man produced a magnifying glass and inspected my passport closely. Then he gave it back to me. ‘There, now we can be comfortable together. Your passport is fine. So far as I’m concerned it could say anything, for instance
If my aunt had wheels she’d be an omnibus
, or –’ he was looking for something equally silly, and I supplied it: ‘Or
There’s a funfair on in Heaven
.’

‘Yes, just so long as the stamp on the passport photo is genuine,’ he went on. ‘You see, I’ve recently been on a course showing us how to recognise forged papers. After that we were able to unmask several Yugoslavian partisans with apparently faultless German papers. They spoke good German, and only one little thing in their papers was wrong: the edges of the official stamp were forged.’ He pointed to the bank of the river. ‘Look over there: we strung up those partisans on meat hooks a little farther on inside that forest.’

I was shocked and upset, and had the greatest difficulty in hiding it. If I had handed him my identity card he would have seen at once that it was forged, and that would have meant my certain death.

He went on to tell me about other Slavs who had forged papers and spoke excellent German, but could not pronounce the letter H. I immediately thought of my Russian grandmother, who was said to have called her son ‘Gerbert’ and her son-in-law ‘Germann’. And then I fell victim to a strange phenomenon: for a few hours I myself couldn’t pronounce an H. I had to steer a course around any word with H in it, like ‘heaven’, or think of an alternative. Such was the absurd result of the mortal fear that, once more, I had survived.

I was very glad when we had left Budapest behind us. The outline of the city rooftops, considered so beautiful, did not appeal to me at all. I associated Budapest with the appalling Hungarian officer who had drunk wine with me in Lom. Until we reached the Hungarian capital, moreover, I was waiting in great suspense for a telegram from Goll. He had assured me that he would be told exactly when I was travelling, and had asked me not on any account to get in touch with him on my own initiative.

I spent the last part of the river voyage on deck in fine weather, talking to the workers who, like me, were going on to Vienna. One of them had a copper ashtray with him. I borrowed it for a moment on some excuse, took it into the toilet and burned Goll’s unopened letter, with a certain sense of personal pride: I was not such a moral wreck as to break my word out of mere curiosity. I threw the ashes away and gave the man his ashtray back.

We reached Vienna that evening. The ship emptied, and a long line formed on the quayside. After we had gone through the first passport control, I asked the man in charge of the transport, who was standing next to me in the queue, ‘Can I go now?’

‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everyone has to be checked by the Gestapo men in Morinplatz. You too because of that unusual passport. So stand in line here with the rest of us.’

It was a long way, and the column of weary figures weighed down by their packs moved slowly. As we passed a railway station, I suddenly had an idea. I went into the ticket office, handed in my case at Left Luggage, and rejoined the queue a little later. I felt more mobile and could move more freely now.

On reaching Morinplatz, we were accommodated in a huge concourse full of camp beds and straw mattresses. It was a terrible night. I couldn’t get a wink of sleep, terrified as I was of what might happen next. That meant, of course, that I was exhausted in the morning, when we would all be called up for the Gestapo to check our papers. We had to wait for hours.

When my turn came, I forced myself to go into the Gestapo office in total control of myself. ‘Wait here,’ someone told me in a heavy Viennese accent, offering me a chair. He said he had to telephone and find out whether my personal details and my address were right. After he had gone out, I heard him talking behind the closed door. He was obviously calling the police station responsible for Nitzwalder Strasse in Berlin.