A Man Without Breath

About a minute later there was a loud shout and the chimney came down on top of the spot where I’d been lying. The dust from its collapse covered me, so I was moved further down the street and set down next to some others who were awaiting medical attention. Klara was lying beside me now at less than an arm’s length. Her dress was hardly torn, her eyes were open, and her body was quite unmarked. I called her name several times before it finally dawned on me that she was dead. It was as if her life had just stopped like a clock, and it hardly seemed possible that so much of her future – she couldn’t have been older than thirty – had disappeared in the space of a few seconds.

Other corpses were laid out in the street next to her. I couldn’t see how many. I sat up to look for Franz Meyer and the others, but the effort was too much and I fell back and closed my eyes. And fainted, I suppose.

*

‘Give us back our men.’

You could hear them three streets away – a large and angry crowd of women – and as we turned the corner of Rosenstrasse I felt my jaw slacken. I hadn’t seen anything like this on the streets of Berlin since before Hitler came to power. And whoever would have thought that wearing a nice hat and carrying a handbag was the best way to dress when you were opposing the Nazis?

‘Release our husbands,’ shouted the mob of women as we pushed our way along the street. ‘Release our husbands now.’

There were many more of them than I had been expecting – perhaps several hundred. Even Klara Meyer looked surprised, but not as surprised as the cops and SS who were guarding the Jewish Welfare Office. They gripped their machine pistols and rifles and muttered curses and abuse at the women standing nearest to the door and looked horrified to find themselves ignored or even roundly cursed back. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be: if you had a gun, then people were supposed to do what they were told. That’s page one of how to be a Nazi.

The welfare office on Rosenstrasse near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz was a grey granite Wilhelmine building with a saddle roof next to a synagogue – formerly the oldest in Berlin – partly destroyed by the Nazis in November 1938, and within spitting distance of the Police Praesidium where I had spent most of my adult working life. I might no longer have been working for Kripo but I’d managed to keep my beer-token – the brass identity disc that commanded such craven respect in most German citizens.

‘We’re decent German women,’ shouted one woman. ‘Loyal to the Leader and to the Fatherland. You can’t speak to us like that, you cheeky young bastard.’

‘I can speak to anyone like that who’s misguided enough to be married to a Jew,’ I heard one of the uniformed cops – a corporal – say to her. ‘Go home, lady, or you’ll be shot.’

‘You need a good spanking you little pip,’ said another woman. ‘Does your mother know you’re such an arrogant whelp?’

‘You see?’ said Klara, triumphantly. ‘They can’t shoot us all.’

‘Can’t we?’ sneered the corporal. ‘When we have the orders to shoot, I can promise you’ll get it first, granny.’

‘Take it easy corporal,’ I said and flashed my beer token in front of his face. ‘There’s really no need to be rude to these ladies. Especially on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘Yes sir,’ he said, smartly. ‘Sorry sir.’ He nodded back over his shoulder. ‘Are you going in there, sir?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I turned to Klara and Siv. ‘I’ll try to be as quick as I can.’

‘Then if you would be so kind,’ said the corporal, ‘we need orders, sir. No one’s told us what to do. Just to stay here and stop people from going in. Perhaps you might mention that, sir.’

I shrugged. ‘Sure, corporal. But from what I can see you’re already doing a grand job.’

‘We are?’

‘You’re keeping the peace, aren’t you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘You can’t keep the peace if you start shooting at all these ladies, now can you?’ I smiled at him and then patted his shoulder. ‘In my experience, corporal, the best police work looks like nothing at all and is always soon forgotten.’

I was unprepared for the scene that met me inside, where the smell was already intolerable: a welfare office is not designed to be a transit camp for two thousand prisoners. Men and women with identity tags on string around their necks like travelling children were lined up to use a lavatory that had no door, while others were crammed fifty or sixty to an office where it was standing room only. Welfare parcels – many of them brought by the women outside – filled another room where they had been tossed, but no one was complaining. Things were quiet. After almost a decade of Nazi rule Jews knew better than to complain. It was only the police sergeant in charge of these people who seemed inclined to bemoan his lot, and as he searched a clipboard for Franz Meyer’s name and then led me to the second-floor office where the man was being held, he began to unroll the barbed S-wire of his sharp complaint: