Alexandra "Alix" Baroness von Feldburg is the daughter of a German diplomat and the widow of a leading member of the German Resistance to Hitler. Readers of my novel about the German Resistance, Traitors for the Sake of Humanity, will recognize her. She returns in "Cold Victory" in her capacity as a lawyer, who has made her reputation assisting the prosecution at Nuremberg.
In this excerpt, she arrives in Berlin for the first time since the war and is confronted with her memories.
Alix had lived through Bomber Harris’ ‘Battle of Berlin’ — on the ground. For the second half of 1944, when she was on the run from the Gestapo after the failed coup attempt of 20 July, she had spent much of her time hiding in closets and behind false walls, cowering in cupboards and lying under beds sometimes for hours. She was wanted for treason and had been given refuge by courageous men and women who allowed her to hide in their apartments, sometimes for only a few days, sometimes for a couple of weeks. Yet she had to keep moving, and without being registered at any residence, she could not appear in the air raid shelter without arousing suspicion. Staying above ground during air raids, on the other hand, became so dangerous that she decided to leave Berlin. She went first to a pig farm near Dessau, where she had disguised herself as a slave labourer for almost four months. From there, she made her way to Braunschweig where she had been able to turn herself over to American troops in the closing days of the war.
Her last memories of Berlin were of a city in flames. She had intentionally planned her escape from the city during an air raid because the raid disrupted normal traffic patterns and distracted the attention of the authorities. She had hidden herself aboard a supply train bound for the Western Front. The Allies targeted railheads, and the Reichsbahn did not want their precious cargo of munitions to be found by the RAF bombers. So, the train had crawled out of the city at a pace intended to be too slow for detection from the air. That had enabled her to climb aboard unseen — and prolonged the agony of uncertainty as the bombs rained down.
Yet for all the destruction she had witnessed on the ground, she was not prepared for the carpet of destruction spread out before her as they flew toward the city centre. Before they had reached the worst-hit areas, however, they banked to the right and started to follow the Havel. David shouted above the engines that it was time for her to return to her seat and put her seatbelt on. Alix obeyed in a daze. She'd underestimated how traumatic a return to Berlin would be.
Now she found herself wondering if she could cope. She had told Christian from the start that she would not set foot in the apartment house where she had lived with Philip and where he had killed himself. Christian had arranged for her to live somewhere else. But if she was in Berlin, didn’t she have an obligation to find out what had happened to her parent’s home? Both her parents were dead; her mother had died of heart failure while working in a munitions factory early in 1945, and her father had been shot for desertion during the assault on Berlin. However, her sister Grete was living with relatives in Marburg and her brother Rudi had returned from Soviet imprisonment without his legs; he was in a rehabilitation centre near Kassel. They might want to live in the family home in the future or they might want to sell or rent it — if it was still standing. To find out if it had survived, she would have to visit her childhood neighbourhood and face the memories….
And then there was the Bendlerblock where she had worked so many long, hard and yet rewarding hours. There she had met and forged friendships with the most determined and unwavering opponents of Hitler’s criminal regime — Generaloberst Beck, General Olbricht, General von Treschow — and Philip. Someone said there was a small memorial in the courtyard, marking where Olbricht, Stauffenberg and the others had been executed. She felt she ought to lay a wreath or at least a rose on that spot — yet dreaded the thought of treading the cobbles where such honourable men had been shot without trial. How could she stand where their blood had flowed, cooled and then been scrubbed away by some indignant and ardent supporter of Hitler?
Or what if she had business with subsidiary organs of the Allied Control Council and had to visit the building where the so-called “People’s Court” had held kangaroo trials of those involved in the coup attempt? Where Roland Freisler and his fellow Nationalist Socialist ‘judges’ and lawyers had taunted, ridiculed and condemned her beloved Uncle Erich and so many others because they wanted to restore the rule of law and protect human dignity and rights?
As the tyres squealed under her feet at landing, Alix had a moment of panic. She didn’t want to be here!
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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