‘Somehow they found us. I’ve always known they would in the end. They’ve arrested so many of us over the years.’
‘But you’re here. You’re free again.’
There was rubble in Silke’s hair and her face and clothes were caked in dust. Dagmar guessed what must have happened but she let Silke tell it.
‘The British saved me,’ Silke said half smiling, the dust cracking at the corners of her mouth. ‘The RAF.’
Dagmar could not help thinking how much Silke would have preferred it if it had been the Russians.
‘The police station got hit in the night before they even had a chance to get to work on me,’ Silke said. ‘They’d put me in a separate cell to the men and that was what saved me. They died and I didn’t. I don’t know what happened to the Gestapo guys. Maybe they got hit too, maybe they took shelter, I don’t know. All I know is that I was knocked unconscious and when I came to it was just me and a lot of bodies. There were no emergency services — perhaps they came later, but I doubt it. Anyway, I didn’t wait around to find out. I just got up, walked out of the wreckage and came home. I came for my stuff. I’m going to need it soon.’
‘They obviously ransacked the apartment when they took you,’ Dagmar observed. ‘Is there anything left?’
Silke crossed the little kitchen, turned off the gas tap and pulled the stove from the wall. Behind it was a bare brick wall from which she removed a loose brick, pulling out various papers and a little booklet from the cavity behind.
‘My Orchestra stuff,’ she said. ‘I need to find another place to hide it now.’
‘Stay a little while, Silks. I’ve made some herb tea.’
‘The police might come.’
Dagmar looked at her watch. It was already mid morning.
‘I don’t think they’re coming, Silke. Perhaps they’re dead. Perhaps they’ve just finally given up.’
Silke sat down and drank her tea. Then they shared some food together and talked a little.
Still the police did not come.
Silke decided to sleep. She said she felt dizzy, and went to her room.
Dagmar sat in the kitchen and wondered.
Had Silke been taken to the same police station as her? It seemed likely. If she had, then the notes the police had made about Dagmar’s arrest and confession, about her betrayal of the Red Orchestra cell, would probably have been destroyed in the air raid.
Probably. But not certainly.
Dagmar did not know what police station it had been. They had taken her to and from it in a sealed van. Somewhere in Berlin it was perfectly possible there remained a detailed police account of how, as the war drew to a close, the Jewess Dagmar Fischer had been caught and had subsequently betrayed a Communist cell.
And the Russians were coming.
Dagmar sat and wondered. What should she do?
The afternoon wore on.
Dagmar’s shadow on the kitchen floor crept slowly towards the wall.
Finally Silke emerged. Looking a little bewildered.
Perhaps it was the strange noise that had woken her. A new sound in a city that had heard so many new sounds in recent years. A low crunching, jerking rumbling.
Looking out of the window into the street below, the two young women saw a new sight to fit the new noise. A Russian tank.
Silke actually shouted for joy.
‘They’re here!’ she cried, grabbing Dagmar in a wild embrace and spinning her round. ‘It’s over. We’re free!’
In the Garden of Innocence
‘POOR SILKE,’ DAGMAR said, an empty deadness to her voice and to her eyes. ‘When she saw that first tank in the street she actually cheered. She danced for happiness. She hung a Red eiderdown from our window for a flag and shouted down to the soldiers below. It was that damn flag that brought them to us first. While most sensible girls were hiding in cellars or being boarded up in attics by their mothers, that idiot Silke was shouting at those beasts. Calling out a welcome. Hey, boys! There’s two young women here!’
There was a little drinking fountain nearby. Dagmar got up and went over to it and took a long draught. She had been talking for a long time. Her voice was dry.
Otto remembered his flask of whisky. He produced it and they shared a gulp or two together. The spirit made Dagmar shiver, or perhaps it was her story.
‘Everything you’ve heard about what happened to the women of Berlin in 1945 is true,’ she said in a voice of cold stone, ‘and worse. The raping went on for weeks. Those Russian soldiers went hunting for women like the Nazis had hunted Jews, kicking down doors, shining lights in faces, seeking out girls in every rat hole, and if they could find no girls, then fucking their mothers instead. Silke and I were amongst the very first caught. We went through it all together. Sisters in misery. Those soldiers that she waved at in the street just couldn’t believe their luck, two girls at once and in a nice apartment with beds and everything. A readymade harem, one blonde, one brunette — we covered all the bases, as your American friends would say.’
Dagmar tried to smile but couldn’t. She raised Otto’s flask to her lips and took another gulp. It made her cough a little but also helped stiffen her resolve to resume her story.
‘They kept us prisoners in that nice apartment Pauly bought. Using us as they pleased and renting us out to other soldiers for cigarettes and vodka when they got bored themselves. It was very strange really. They sort of set up home with us, going off for their army duties and then coming back to their sex slaves. Me and Silke together. Sometimes in the same room, sometimes separate. I suppose in a way it was even worse for Silke — she had to suffer the disillusionment. Those soldiers represented everything she’d hoped for. The future of the world. She flung open her door to them and they walked right in and started tearing off her clothes. Mine too, right there and then. Within a minute. Silke tried to show them her KPD card. But they didn’t speak German and if they had they wouldn’t have cared. Nor about the radio code books she kept behind the gas stove and her Resistance accreditation. They were hungry peasants and we were meat, that was all. Perhaps if she could have got out of the apartment, found an officer, someone to understand her, she might have been OK. There were decent ones amongst them I’ve heard. But we were trapped.’
‘Did you tell them you were a Jew?’ Otto asked.
‘I tried once or twice but either they didn’t care or they didn’t believe me. All the German Jews they’d seen had been skeletons.’
Otto opened his suitcase and reached in for a third packet of Lucky Strikes. He could scarcely believe it, they’d smoked twenty each already.
‘And how did it end?’ he said.
‘They started to get lazy and didn’t bother to tie us up any more. I think they almost started to think of us as sort of wives. War wives, of course, but wives nonetheless. Sometimes they brought chocolate and one of them even made paper flowers to put in our vase. Of course that didn’t stop him putting down his scissors and his coloured paper to rape us when his turn came around. They thought we were their right, you see. They didn’t think we had any business complaining after what Germany had done to them. One night Silke had had enough. One of them had fallen into a drunken sleep right on top of her and was snoring in her face. Their breath was always indescribable. Onion and rotting gums. Silke squeezed herself out from under him, crept to where he’d left his belt on a chair and took his gun. I watched beside my own sleeping Russian as she started to put on her clothes. I can see her body now, white in the moonlight, black bruises on her breasts where one of them liked to squeeze her. I don’t know what her plan was, she kept looking at me and putting her fingers to her lips. Anyway, she never got a chance to do anything. Two more came in, getting impatient to have their turn at us. Silke pointed the gun at them but the poor silly fool couldn’t bring herself to fire. She always was a sweet girl and those boys were even younger
