Charlotte Walmsdorf is a victim of the war. Her brothers were both killed fighting for Hitler, and her fiancee went missing. Her parents were killed by a strafing Soviet fighter. The family home was overrun by the Red Army and turned over to Polish refugees. She was gang raped by Soviet soldiers in the closing days of the war. Yet she survived and struggled to make a living, first as a journalist, then teaching English, and finally running the office of Air Ambulance International. She also fell in love with David Goldman and everything seemed to be getting better -- until her fiancee returned from Siberia.
In this excerpt, Charlotte drags herself through another day, which seems to her like everyday of the rest of her life. She is living with her cousin, Christian, in his apartment in the American Sector in Berlin; her fiancee Fritz has moved into the guest bedroom since his unexpected return from a Russian prison camp.
Waiting in line for rations had taken five hours and forty minutes today. Charlotte was chilled to the bone despite wearing her dead brother’s Wehrmacht greatcoat over her mother’s thickest jumper and woollen underwear. Her feet were sore from standing so long, too. As she dragged herself back in the direction of the apartment house, she shuffled more like a woman in her sixties than in her thirties, and she did not want to think about the future.
On the blank brick wall exposed by the collapse of the house in an air raid, two young men were busy tearing down the SPD posters that had been put up the day before. Charlotte looked at them warily, prepared to make a run for her apartment building, but they were too thin and shabby to be Russians. She relaxed enough to watch them roll out a new poster and affix it to the wall with their glue-soaked brushes. It was a photo of Berlin burning after an air raid. In large red letters dripping red drops to suggest blood, it read: “Voting strengthens the warmongers! Voting means more night bombing!”
As if Hitler hadn’t started the war! As if Stalin hadn’t been his friend!
She had watched the youths for too long. One of them noticed her. “Hey! Frau! Do you live around here?”
“What business is that of yours!” She answered, turning to hurry away.
He shouted after her. “This block of houses has already been allocated to the Red Army. They’ll move in before the New Year. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to make them feel warmly welcome!” He and his companion laughed.
Charlotte fled, trying to tell herself it was just empty threats and intimidation. “Bullying” was the word David would have used.
The thought of David almost made her stumble. David, David, David. He had given her the practical, thick-soled, warm shoes on her feet and the soft woollen gloves on her hands. Most of all he had given her back the will and a reason to live. Charlotte had hoped this Christmas would be filled with thankfulness and joy for the first time in five years, but that dream had shattered with Fritz’s return.
She paused before the door of her apartment house and looked up toward the top floor. Fritz was up there now, waiting for her and the rations. She wished she didn’t have to go up to him. Even queuing in the cold was better than being with Fritz. He watched her every move and his eyes seemed to take her clothes off and seek to penetrate her soul at the same time. He pressured her to tell him everything that had happened since they parted in the autumn of 1942.
She’d told him what she could: what it had been like in Silesia on her father’s estate with only women and prisoners of war as labourers. She’d tried to describe what it was like as the front came closer and the refugees swept through, full of horror stories about Russian atrocities. She informed him of her brothers’ deaths and explained her father’s decision to flee by horse-cart. She’d forced herself to recount how the strafing Soviet fighter had killed both her parents, her mother’s maid and one of the horses. She’d attempted to convey how numb and hopeless she’d felt when she arrived in Berlin. She’d tried to make him understand her relief at being given refuge in her cousin’s house. Yet when she admitted that her cousin had been part of the plot against Hitler, Fritz had spat out “treasonous filth!” and she had said no more.
That didn’t stop Fritz from trying to drag more information out of her. He’d asked her what happened after the war, but she kept her answers vague. She claimed she’d survived as a freelance journalist, which was partially true, but she hadn’t breathed a word about Air Ambulance International — or David, of course.
What was the point? She’d broken off with David, admitting to herself that her hopes for a life with him had been a fantasy. He didn’t know about the rapes. He would never have married her after he found out.
Drawing a deep breath, she put down the string bag with the rations, took out her key and unlocked the front door. Once inside, she started wearily up the shallow stairs. In the dark of the unlighted interior (there would be no electricity in this part of the city until six am tomorrow), fear closed around her like a stagnant fog. Those young men had said the Red Army would move in as soon as the Western Allies withdrew. Everyone queuing for rations had been talking about how the Amis and Brits would pull out after the election. Not enough planes were getting through. Food reserves were running out. Rations could not be cut any more. Some people claimed that the announced evacuation of children and chronically ill was a sham. What was really happening, they said, was that the Allies were sending their own children home. The Allied troops would be on the last planes out, and then all of Berlin would belong to the Ivans again.
Charlotte stopped on the landing to get hold of herself. Her heart was pounding not from exertion but from fear. She would not let them do it to her again. Her cousin Christian had given her a pistol, one of several he’d bought on the black market. She had a dozen bullets as well. She would kill herself rather than let them touch her again.
Sometimes, she indulged in imagining what it would be like to kill one or two of them first. She would aim for their faces. Once upon a time, when she had been the daughter of a count with a large estate and had gone hunting with her brothers, she had been a good shot. She was not unfamiliar or uncomfortable with guns. If they were trying to come in the front door, she could position herself in the doorway of the corner room, just three or four metres away. From there, with them confined in the hall and silhouetted against the light on the landing, she thought she could hit them in the face. Out of hate. Out of revenge.
But she mustn’t think about it, she told herself. It was bad enough that her thoughts rotated around this final moment of her life in the dark of her sleepless nights.
She continued up the stairs to the fourth floor and again put down the bag of rations to let herself into the apartment. The interior was dark, silent and icy cold. They did not have enough coal to heat anything except the kitchen oven, and that for only a couple of hours a day. Charlotte could see her breath.
The sound of the door clunking shut behind her provoked a growl from the far end of the hall. “Is that you, Lotte? Where have you been?” Fritz demanded, adding in a self-pitying tone, “I’ve been waiting for you for hours!”
“Yes, Fritz, it’s me!” Charlotte answered, trying to sound cheerful. “I told you I was going out to get our rations.”
“That was hours ago!” Fritz complained, limping to stand in the doorway of the “Berliner Room” that occupied the corner of the house. “Don’t you realise I can’t do anything without your help!”
It was too dark to see more than his shape, but Charlotte could picture him all too well: the way his left eye couldn’t stay focused and drifted off to the side; his mouth with only half his teeth and the others rotting and stinking horribly; the mutilated right hand with only two remaining fingers with perpetually filthy nails. Christian and she had found clothes to replace the rags he’d arrived in, but they had no hot water to give him a proper bath. Although Christian had made him strip down and stand in the tub to be sponged off with water heated in the kettle, the stink of the Gulag clung to him.
“The lines are very long,” Charlotte explained. “I had to wait five hours and forty minutes.”
“Arrogant bastards,” Fritz snarled.
“They’re doing the best they can,” Charlotte reminded him.
“Really? In that case, they’re incompetent fools. Bumbling idiots! We could organise things much better!”
“What do you mean?” The question cracked like a gunshot from Christian, who stepped out of the front salon. He lived there now that Fritz had moved into the second bedroom.
“People never had to wait in long lines for rations in German-occupied territory. Everything was properly organised and went like clockwork!” Fritz bragged.
“Right into the gas chambers!” Christian flung back, adding, “Nobody stood in line for rations because we killed or deported them instead.”
“I should have known a traitor like you wouldn’t be proud of his country!”
“You’re proud of murdering millions?”
“Stop it!” Charlotte shouted. “Stop it!” It was directed at both of them.
“This is my house,” Christian answered in a tone of voice his subordinates in the Luftwaffe would have recognised. “I’ll say what I please.”
“Don’t, Christian! Please don’t!” Charlotte pleaded, tears forming in her eyes. She dropped the rations and, pushing past Fritz, ran to her room at the far end of the hall, slamming the door. Behind her, the angry voices of Christian and Fritz exchanging insults continued. She flung herself onto the bed, covered her head with her pillow and started sobbing. Part of her wondered if she should bother waiting for the Ivans to come. Maybe she should just shoot herself now?
Find out more about the Bridge to Tomorrow series, the awards it has won, and read reviews at: https://helenapschrader.net/bridge-to-tomorrow/
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