When We Danced on Water (19 page)

He had experience this time and so, on his third attempt on the evening of April 30, 1945, at just an hour before midnight, Teo left the house in Grunewald for the last time. He had not seen life beyond the gates in nearly three years.

Berlin was not at all as he recalled. Peaceful and gracious avenues were now overrun with rubble and litter and people running this way and that. White-paint messages shouted from every wall:
Every German will defend his capital! Victory or Siberia! Wir kapitulieren nie!
Just two blocks from the house a man ran past him screaming, “
Die Russen sind hier! Die Russen sind hier!
” and then around a corner came a Russian tank, aimed straight at him. Teo signaled to the tank, hoping to stop it, but the tank nearly ran him down and Teo was forced to jump to the side of the avenue, where he fell on the curb.

Suddenly he was being dragged from behind. “You fool,” the voice behind him said, “what did you think you were doing?” Teo turned toward the middle-aged man who had just pulled him into a doorway. “That was a Russian tank, did you think he would stop to give you a ride? You're lucky he didn't shoot you or run you down! They've taken over the Reichstag, I saw the flag flying myself. The Reich is dead, some say Herr Hitler, too, long live the Führer! This is it, friend, our days of glory are over.”

Teo threw back his head and with a violent heave, spat into the man's face. He dashed back into the street, running and running toward the center of the city, the rubble and madness increasing as he went. Traffic was streaming steadily in the opposite direction as German officers tried to flee and the conquering Russians tried to capture them, or chase them out, Teo was not sure which. There were no streetlights and movement was slow and dangerous.

Teo did not stop to ask himself where he was going; after hours of wandering, nearly run over on several occasions, after dodging stray bullets and falling repeatedly on bricks or bodies, he found himself at the entrance to the Tiergarten. Gone were the swans, gone were the animals in the zoo, gone were most of the trees; the park had been stripped for fuel, for food, for whatever besieged Berliners needed. Here, on a low, grassy slope, Teo finally fell to the ground and slept until morning.

Teo roamed Berlin for two days, starved and parched. Sometimes he hid in abandoned buildings that looked as though they might fall on top of him, sometimes he returned to one park or another. A bomb fell half a block from him once and set his ears ringing for hours.

On his third morning of wandering about Berlin, two Russian soldiers lifted him off the ground from a deep sleep in a small graveyard, just several hundred meters from the house that had been his prison and refuge for nearly six years. They brought him to an old stone church, one of the few buildings on the block left standing, and locked him up with twenty other men in a pen built for four or five. “
Ich bin ein Jude
,” he protested first in German, then in Polish, but the soldiers were unimpressed. His cellmates eyed him warily, and one elbowed him in the stomach.

The next day Teo and several of his cellmates were called on to testify before being shipped out to a POW camp near Oranienburg. Teo answered all questions, explained his precarious imprisonment in a posh suburban villa, but could sense that his interrogators did not believe his story. Worse, one of the burly Russians seemed as though he might like to take advantage of Teo much like Freddy had.

For nearly a fortnight Teo was treated as a German prisoner of war, incarcerated with other males who had not been at the front: the lame, the insane, the elderly, the boys.

Finally, on his third appearance before the prison administration, he had a reprieve; a Polish Jew had been employed to interrogate the Polish speakers.

“What is your name?” he asked in Polish.

“Teodor Levin, sir. From Warsaw.”

“I have heard this name before.”

“You have? I was once a dancer …”

“Yes, precisely, that's it! I have a folder here somewhere,” he said. He left his desk for only a few moments before returning with a dossier that he began to leaf through.

Teo was elated to meet someone who, for the first time in years, knew who he really was.

The man looked from the dossier to Teo and back to the dossier. “You don't look much like your photograph anymore,” he said at last. He took Teo's chin in his hand, turned his head from side to side. “But your eyes match the description.” He released Teo's face and shook his hand. “My name is Harry Cukier,” he said in Polish. “I'd like you to answer a few questions for me.”

In fact, it turned out that Cukier knew certain details of Teo's story even better than Teo did. He told Teo that it was Freddy himself who had had him detained and then released to his custody, that Teo could have returned to Copenhagen even in the first few weeks after the outbreak of war, despite what Freddy had told him. He told Teo that members of the Resistance had stopped looking for him years earlier, since a young man traveling under his name, with his identification papers, had boarded a northbound train in January 1940 but was stopped at the Danish border and sent to Sachsenhausen and later Auschwitz, where he perished. “Your baron dispatched some unlucky young man to certain capture and death just to keep you hidden and for himself,” Cukier said, shaking his head. “But you are safe and in relatively good health, I see, so no matter what has happened to you, you are far luckier than most of our fellow Jews.”

Teo looked down at himself, his body violated but whole. In the weeks following his escape from Grunewald he had been hearing stories of the concentration camps, of torture and deprivation, of beatings and gassings, of mass extermination, the Final Solution Freddy had refused to explain. He had slept through the war on eiderdown in a villa filled with books. He had spent his days tracing the brush stroke of a Matisse or admiring the spectacular color of a Tahitian Gaugin. He closed his eyes tightly. “Do you have any word of my family?” he asked.

Cukier closed the dossier, sighed heavily. “Your parents and your Danish friends were frantic to find you, but Warsaw was under siege almost from the very day you arrived in Berlin. We lost contact with your parents shortly after they were moved into the Ghetto.”

Teo held his breath and Cukier continued. “Your father, Oskar, fell ill and passed away there. Your mother, Rosa Levin, was deported to Treblinka in August 1942. She did not survive. Your sister, Margot, however, was not with them, and there is fair reason to believe she was hidden and may be alive today.”

Teo's head suddenly felt too heavy for his body. He folded his arms and laid it on top of them, barely breathing. Cukier placed a knobby hand awkwardly on his own. Teo was grateful for this fatherly human touch, but he could muster no emotion. He wanted nothing more than the black obliteration of deep sleep.

They sat this way for several minutes, until Cukier said, “You obviously do not belong in this prison. I'll reassign you to the DP camp. The Sonnenfeld family were ferried to safety in Sweden several years ago, they'll probably already be back in Copenhagen so you may wish to consider relocating there.” He stopped talking, and Teo lifted his head from the table. “I wouldn't return to Warsaw if I were you. The city's been razed, it's hard to believe you'll find anyone you know there. Besides, you left so many years ago …” Cukier could see that this was too overwhelming for Teo. “Anyway,” he continued, “you'll have to think about all this. Try to remember that you've been very lucky, that you have a new start in life now. Try to return to the living.”

In July he returned to Copenhagen, calling himself Teo. The ballet master found him lodgings in an apartment building owned by the Royal Theater, just a small room under the eaves but a place for him to live free of charge. Teo tried working himself into shape, joined a few classes, but no longer possessed the stamina, the flexibility or the drive. Instead he was given a job working with the youngest dancers, and served as assistant rehearsal director and choreographer. Many of his classmates were now in the corps de ballet or even dancing as principals, including Niels. They were sympathetic toward him but kept their distance.

Two years passed thus. Teo's world was almost as narrow as his life in Berlin had been. He rarely socialized, spent his days at the theater and his nights alone at home. On Friday evenings he would eat a festive Sabbath meal with the Sonnenfelds, then escape as early as possible to his tiny apartment. He declined invitations and eventually the world complied and left him alone.

But a letter he received in his second Danish winter would change all that:

2 February 1947

Dear Mr. Levin,

The Soviet sector of the Allied Control Council formally requests your participation at the trial of Friedrich Sebastien Amadeus von Edelwald, lieutenant-general in German Military Intelligence from 1939 to 1945. It is believed that your testimony is crucial in the pursuit of justice and we thereby request that you make every effort to be present. Your travel expenses and accommodations will be provided by the Council.

The trial is scheduled to open 17 April. Please make plans to be at the Allied Control Council headquarters in Berlin, at the address below, several days prior.

Respectfully,
Ivan Poliakov
Presiding Judge, Soviet Military Tribunal

Teo moved the letter around his apartment for several days, rereading it when he awoke each morning, when he returned from the ballet, before falling asleep. It brought him nightmares, and daymares too. One morning he put the letter in the rubbish bin but by that evening he had fished it out again.

On April 14 Teo packed a bag with his meager belongings. In an inner pocket of his overcoat he placed Freddy's cuff links and fountain pen and lighter, all of which he kept buried under a pile of handkerchiefs in his bureau drawer. He locked the apartment and walked to Copenhagen Central.

At passport control on the German border he began to shake violently, but an aperitif back on board calmed his nerves enough to complete the journey. The German countryside was quiet and pastoral, a bright jeweled green in the spring sunshine.

Pockets of the city were still in ruins, but Berlin was already showing signs of becoming the lively city it had once been. Teo found the Allied Control Council headquarters easily and gave a deposition on the morning following his arrival. He was surprised to learn that Freddy was on trial for the murder of two Soviet soldiers who had tried to detain him on the evening of April twenty-fifth, only two or three hours after the last time Teo had seen him. On a break during Teo's deposition, a young German-speaking military adjudicator sidled up to him and whispered that this trial and the defendant's imprisonment in Germany and not the USSR were highly unusual and due to a combination of his high-ranking connections and money and certain facts that would come to light during the trial. Before Teo could ask what he meant, the break was over and the adjudicator had slipped from the room.

On the day of the trial, Teo arrived early and spent half an hour switching from seat to seat in the slowly filling courtroom. He settled, finally, on a spot close to the front but off to the side, from which he would have a clear view of the defendant's face but from which Freddy might not be able to see him well.

Shackled and gaunt in prison uniform, Freddy was led into the courtroom at just after ten o'clock, his eyes to the floor. Seeing him sent a jolt so great through Teo's entire body that for a moment he thought he had been shot or electrocuted, or that maybe his heart had burst open. He made a gasping noise that caused Freddy to look up, and when he saw Teo he stopped in his tracks. “Oh thank God, thank God,” he cried in German. A guard shoved him into his seat, but Freddy stole glances at Teo when he could and continued weeping.

Teo sat doubled over in pain for the first part of the proceedings. He wished to bolt but felt as though he were riveted to his chair. It was all he could do to keep from tumbling sideways to the floor.

The charges against Freddy were read to the court in German and Russian. No mention was made of his art dealings, nothing was said about Ernst Halberstadt or the boy who had been sent to his death with Teodor Levin's documents. Freddy's statement was read before the court, and then Freddy himself was called to the stand.

From the moment he sat in the box, Freddy did not stop looking at Teo. Teo could only glance away. It came back to him in a flood now, the humiliation, the violence, the endless hours of servicing Freddy's obsession. He remembered, too, the tender moments, Freddy's proclamations of love and his own confused responses. He did not know which sickened him more.

“No,” he heard Freddy saying. “It wasn't like that at all. It was completely unintentional. I was merely desperate to return to my home in Grunewald.”

“But you did, in fact, murder two Soviet soldiers in cold blood, did you not?” said the Russian prosecutor, a bald man with an elaborate goatee. There were pauses in the proceedings as interpreters translated between languages. Teo wore a pair of headphones in order to make sure he could understand the questions, but Freddy's answers came to him unimpeded.

“I ran them over in a mad dash to reach home. I was terribly worried about the fate of someone in my care and so …”

“ … and so you took the lives of two others in order to protect this person.”

“I repeat, it was not intentional. They were there when I rounded a corner coming out of intelligence headquarters. I was speeding. I was hoping to save a Jew hidden in my household.”

A murmur arose in the courtroom, which the judge quelled with his gavel.

“You expect the court to believe that you, a Generalleutnant, were harboring a Jew for his protection right in your home, just a few kilometers from Nazi headquarters?”

“Yes, he'd been safe there with me for six years, from the first day of the war.”