And neither have I, Effi thought, as she walked back up to the Ku’damm. Her interviews with Kuhnert and the British Major had been more than a little depressing, but Ellen and the crowd in the cafeteria had lifted her spirits. And if Berlin could be resurrected, there was nowhere else she would rather be.
After leaving Effi, Russell walked east along the rapidly wakening Ku’damm and up Joachimstaler Strasse to Zoo Station. The first DP camp he intended visiting was in Moabit, a walkable distance to the north, but laziness and the sight of a local train rumbling west across the Hardenbergstrasse bridge persuaded him to make use of the Stadtbahn. Walking up to the platform he noticed that most of the signs were also in Russian.
The next train was tightly packed, its passengers almost bursting out through the opening doors. Shoving his way on board, Russell found himself standing with his face almost pressed to the glass, and forced to confront Berlin’s ruin. The gouged and pitted flak towers were still there, and beyond them the deforested Tiergarten, a sea of stumps in which small islands of cultivation were now sprouting.
The air on the train offered stark proof of the continuing soap shortage, and once decanted on the Bellevue platform, Russell took several deep breaths of purer air. It was all relative, of course, and his nose was soon under renewed assault, this time from the River Spree. There were no floating bodies as far as he could see, but the scum floating on the stagnant surface was an uncomfortable melange of yellows and browns, and the smell rising up was suitably disgusting. The bridge he had intended to cross lay broken in the water.
A passer-by told him that the next one up was open, but that proved something of an exaggeration — a makeshift wooden walkway offered pedestrian access to the other bank, but the original bridge was still in the river. He crossed and continued northwards, down a street still lined with piles of broken masonry. A team of women was stacking bricks — die Trummerfrauen, Thomas had called them, ‘the rubble women’ — their breath forming plumes in the cold morning air.
It was time he got to work, Russell thought. Tomorrow he would spend some time at the Press Camp, talk to his fellow journalists, get the lay of the land. The occupiers would be imposing restrictions on reporting, but he had no idea what they were, or whether the different occupation authorities had different rules. And the current mechanics of sending out copy were also a mystery. With civil communications in tatters, were they using military channels?
All of which would sort itself out soon enough. But what was he going to write about? The story that interested him, but apparently not many others, was what had happened to the Jewish survivors. It seemed as if the Nazi crimes against the Jews were still being undersold, almost lost in the general shuffle of European misery. Perhaps he was still seeking atonement for 1942, when he’d been unable to get the story the prominence and urgency it deserved, but he didn’t think so. Over the last few months all four occupation powers had forced Jewish refugees to share camps with their persecutors, but there’d been no cries of outrage, or none from anyone with the power to make changes.
His and Effi’s search for Rosa’s father would make a good story, or provide a good narrative on which to hang the wider theme. He would have to change the names, of course — Rosa had traumas enough to work through without becoming a poster child for orphans.
And then there was Miriam. It would really be a miracle if she was still alive.
He had reached the southern edge of the Little Tiergarten, which looked in no better shape than its bigger brother. He walked diagonally across the bare expanse, past a scorched and trackless Tiger tank with the words ‘Siberia or Death’ still emblazoned on one side. Two children eyed him warily from the open turret, and he wondered if the tank was only a place to play, or what they now called home.
As he passed the cemetery behind the old municipal baths he noticed several long lines of freshly dug graves, and what looked like a team of prisoners digging more. It was several seconds before he realised who they were probably meant for — the victims of the coming winter.
The old barracks loomed in front of him. There was a wall around the compound and British soldiers at the gate, who checked his papers and gave him directions for the camp administration office. En route, he noticed that one barracks door was slightly open, and took a quick look inside. The large open space had been divided up by the simple expedient of using lockers to form waist-high walls, inside which double-decker bunks were arranged in squares, enclosing a small private space. The barracks were cold and surprisingly quiet, a fact that Russell first attributed to a lack of residents. But as his eyes grew used to the gloom he realised that almost every bunk had one or more silent owner. The sense of hopelessness was almost overwhelming.
He continued on to the office, where three young Englishmen were lording it over three elderly German assistants. Once Russell had explained the reason for his visit, a sergeant with a Yorkshire accent interrupted his game of patience to instruct one of the latter, who reached for the pile of exercise books that contained the camp records, and began working his way through them. He was halfway through the last but one when he found an Otto Pappenheim.
Russell could hardly believe it. Nor did he really want to — he knew what losing Rosa would mean to Effi. As the German checked the final book for Miriam Rosenfeld, he reminded himself that Otto and Pappenheim were both fairly common names.
‘Can you tell me anything about him?’ Russell asked the man in German, once the search for Miriam had ended in failure.
‘No, but maybe Gerd can. Wait a minute.’ He walked stiffly across to the doorway of the adjoining room and asked a colleague to join them.
Gerd, a wafer-thin man in his sixties, was still wearing his Volkssturm jacket, albeit without the insignia. When he heard the name ‘Otto Pappenheim’ he made a face, which worried Russell even more. ‘Yes, I remember him,’ he said. ‘He turned up in the summer, the beginning of August, I think. He had his Jewish identity card, which was unusual — most destroyed them when they went into hiding. I didn’t like him, but I couldn’t really tell you why. He didn’t stay long. He soon found a job and somewhere else to live, which was also unusual, but we can always use the extra bed.’
‘So you don’t know where he went?’
‘Oh, he had to give us an address, or his ration card wouldn’t have been re-issued. It’ll be in there,’ he added, pointing out one of his colleague’s desk drawers. And it was, Solinger Strasse 47. ‘That’s not far from here,’ the first German told him. ‘It’s one of the streets off Levetzowstrasse. On the south side.’
Fifteen minutes later, Russell was walking down Solinger Strasse, trying to deduce which of the still-standing buildings was number 47. An elderly man sitting in a doorway pointed it out. ‘The one at the end,’ he said, ‘thanks to the Reichsmarschal.’ Russell saw what he meant — the original end of the block had been destroyed by Allied bombers, which Goering had famously promised would never reach Berlin. Now a wall boasting seven empty grates and seven different wallpapers rose towards the sky.
A woman he met in the lobby gave him Otto Pappenheim’s room number. Rather reluctantly, Russell thought, as if she wanted nothing to do with Otto, or anyone looking for him.
Russell climbed three storeys, and knocked on the appropriate door. There were no sounds of life within, either then or after a second hammering, but another woman emerged from a flat across the landing. ‘He’s hardly ever there,’ she told Russell in response to his question. She had no idea where Otto worked, if indeed he did, but he only used the room for sleeping. ‘He’s a Jew,’ she added with barely concealed disgust. ‘That’s how he got the flat.’
Back out on the street, Russell started walking towards the river. He wouldn’t tell Effi, he decided, not till he knew whether this was the Otto they sought.