Storm Front

Chapter Fifteen

Wieland House, Berlin

28 July 1985

I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that, Gudrun thought, as she walked slowly up the stairs, the tray balanced neatly on one hand. Father is not going to be pleased.

She shuddered as she reached the top of the stairs. Her father was the master of the house, as far as he was concerned, and even his adult children couldn’t defy him without punishment – if, of course, he considered her an adult at all. She was, after all, a girl… she’d pass straight from her father’s authority to her husband’s without ever having any true freedom of her own. Konrad had seemed willing to accept her as anything but a housewife, yet would that have lasted once they were married? He might have changed his mind when his comrades starting mocking him for having a wife who actually worked.

Gudrun gritted her teeth in helpless fury. She wasn’t scared of her father’s punishments, even the threat of his belt, but she was scared of being told she couldn’t go back to the university and study. Even if she hadn’t been involved in the… whatever they came to call their little group… the threat would have scared her. She needed her father’s permission to study at the university and, no matter how clever she was, they wouldn’t allow her to stay if her father changed his mind. The Reich wouldn’t allow the university to call into question a husband’s or father’s role as head of the household. Hell, she knew girls who had been withdrawn a few weeks after entering the university because their parents had thought better of it.

I’m not going to let him take me out, she thought, grimly. But what could she do? Her father had ultimate authority over her, as long as she was unmarried. And it wasn’t as if she could marry Konrad tomorrow. What do I do?

She paused outside Grandpa Frank’s door, feeling beaten and defeated. It wasn’t fair! She knew she was smarter than her brothers, she knew she was a better student than half the boys at university, yet the mere fact of being born a girl hampered her future. She’d never be truly free, she’d never be truly independent; she’d never even be able to get married without her father’s consent. Unless, of course, she allowed herself to get pregnant out of wedlock, which would have its own complications. Her parents would be furious and her in-laws wouldn’t be very pleased either.

Rapping on the door, she pushed it open. The stench of beer and smelly old man seemed weaker, somehow; Gudrun wondered, savagely, if her mother had given the room an airing out while her grandfather had been downstairs, then dismissed the thought as she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. Grandpa Frank was sitting up in bed, reading a small leather-bound book; he looked up at her, then slipped the book under the sheets. Gudrun guessed, as she put the tray down and cleared away the remains of his lunch, that it was a dirty book. A handful of French books had been passed around at school before the teachers confiscated them and they’d been very explicit indeed.

“Here’s your dinner,” Gudrun said shortly, as she picked up the tray and put it on the bedside table. “Mother will be up later…”

She broke off as Grandpa Frank’s hand lunged out with terrifying speed and caught her wrist, pulling her towards him. Gudrun struggled, trying to pull free, but his hand felt like a band of steel. She couldn’t understand how he was so strong, when he spent most of the day in bed, yet it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that she was trapped.

“Sit down,” Grandpa Frank hissed. “Don’t make a noise.”

“Let go of me,” Gudrun said. If she shouted… what did Grandpa Frank want? Her imagination supplied too many possibilities. “Please…”

“It was you,” Grandpa Frank whispered. “You helped write those leaflets.”

Gudrun stared at him in shock. “How do you…?”

“It was written all over your face when you saw the leaflet on the table,” Grandpa Frank rasped. He pulled her into a sitting position on the bed, then met her eyes. It struck her, suddenly, that he sounded surprisingly sober. “You knew what it was before you opened it, before your mother snapped at you for even trying. I hope your father didn’t read that on your face.”

“I hope so too,” Gudrun said, trying to keep her voice level. She’d feared her father somehow guessing her involvement, she’d suspected Kurt would deduce her involvement… but Grandpa Frank? He was a drunkard. She’d assumed he wouldn’t pay any attention to anything beyond the next bottle of beer. “How…?”

“I read the leaflet,” Grandpa Frank told her. “Not a bad piece of work, really.”

“Thank you,” Gudrun said. He hadn’t let go of her wrist and it was starting to ache. “I… Grandpa… let go of me?”

“I have something to tell you,” Grandpa Frank said. He met her eyes. “Promise you won’t run?”

“I won’t,” Gudrun said. What choice did she have? Maybe her father wouldn’t believe Grandpa Frank, but if he took one look at her former uniform the game would be up. “What do you want to tell me?”

Her grandfather let go of her wrist. “I never told anyone this,” he whispered, hoarsely. “Not even your grandmother, may she rest in peace. She knew I had nightmares – your mother knows I have nightmares – but she never knew why. There are… things… I never wanted your mother to know.”

Gudrun shivered. She’d been woken, sometimes, by Grandpa Frank screaming in his sleep, calling out names of people she didn’t recognise. Her father had said that it was a legacy of the war, but he’d refused to say anything more and forbidden her from talking to her grandfather about it. No doubt he knew something about his father-in-law’s military service – he’d have needed Grandpa Frank’s permission to marry his daughter – yet he’d never seen fit to share the secret. In time, Gudrun had decided that there was no secret.

Her grandfather sat upright and pulled up his right sleeve, revealing a blue tattoo. Gudrun stared; she’d seen Konrad’s tattoo, more than once, but Konrad hadn’t had a skull and crossbones over his ID number. She’d never even heard of anyone having anything more than a number, as long as they were in the military. Kurt had once asked for a tattoo and his father had bawled him out for even thinking of it before he completed his time in the Hitler Youth, let alone the military.

Gudrun tried to think about what it meant. “You were an SS stormtrooper?”

“I was Einsatzgruppen,” Grandpa Frank said. “Do you know what that means?”

He answered the question before she could find the words. “Of course you don’t know what that means,” he said, bitterly. He gave a harsh little laugh that chilled her to the bone. “We were the Reich’s dirty little secret. You don’t know, none of you know, just what the Reich did to secure itself. How can you know? You’ve been lied to from the very start.”

Gudrun swallowed. “What secret?”

“I drink to forget,” Grandpa Frank said. He eyed one of the bottles – an unopened bottle, she noted with some surprise – and then shook his head. “I always wondered why they didn’t round us up and kill us all, Gudrun. It wasn’t as if we could have stopped them from exterminating us. The secret would have died with us.”

He caught her wrist again, holding it tightly. “You weren’t there,” he said. “You couldn’t understand. I joined the SS when it started; I helped purge the SA when the Fuhrer decided their leader had gone a little too far.” He snickered. “But you won’t have heard of them, will you? Röhm is an unperson now, serves the bastard right. I did well in my work, too well; they offered me a chance to transfer to the Einsatzgruppen when they were founded and told me there was a promotion in it for me if I did well. And they were right. I did very well.

“We went into Poland and Russia behind the armies, Gudrun. We rounded up soldiers, political leaders, everyone on the hit-list… we marched them into the camps, at first, and then we killed them. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were killed – and, after they were dead, we stripped them bare; we even stole their teeth. The bodies were dumped in unmarked mass graves, which were soon wiped from the records. I watched as entire villages were given to the flames, their populations destroyed so that new German settlers could be moved eastwards. Germany East is built on a giant mass grave.”

Gudrun stared at him. She’d been told, at school, how Hitler had taken Russia as living space, but she’d never thought through the implications. What had happened to the original inhabitants? They’d been subhuman, she’d been taught; they’d deserved to be displaced…

“But it was in Warsaw that it happened,” Grandpa Frank said. “It was 1944; the Americans had invaded Japan, the Russian armies were being destroyed and we were clearing the city of Jews. I was in charge of one block… there was a Jewess living there. She was the mother of a little girl, but she was pretty. I made sure she got to remain there as long as she was my lover.”

“A Jewess,” Gudrun repeated, shocked. The pictures she’d seen of Jews had all shown misshapen figures, so dirty and filthy they could hardly pass for human. “You started an affair with a stinking Jewess?”

Her grandfather squeezed her wrist, hard. “You’ve been lied to,” he said harshly, as she winced in pain and tried to pull away. “They were human. They didn’t have horns, or cloven feet, and they certainly didn’t stink. You couldn’t tell the difference between a Jew and a German if you met them in the streets. Tell me – how could the misshapen monsters you’re taught to recognise at school possibly pass for Germans?”

Gudrun swallowed. She’d never thought about it.

“That woman… I was her lover for nearly a year,” Grandpa Frank said. “Her child… she started to call me papa. I used to bring her little gifts as well as ration packs; I even fiddled the records so she’d be classed as a Pole, rather than a Jew. It wasn’t much, but I thought it would keep them alive for longer. Maybe it did. But in the end they found out.”

He laughed harshly. “They weren’t too pleased at me sticking it in a Jewess, I can tell you,” he said, darkly. “I might have sired a child on her, you know; a half-German child. That really would have upset the Race Classification Bureau. They might even have had to class the child as something other than a Jew. But I didn’t get her pregnant. My CO told me that I had to take her to the camps myself. I had to sentence her to death to save myself. And I did, Gudrun. I bound her hands, put her in the car and drove her to the camps. All the way, the little girl was asking me where we were going, what had happened to her mother…”

“No,” Gudrun said.

“Yes,” Grandpa Frank said. “They took them both at once, of course; they added them to the next batch for extermination. I was forced to watch as they were both stripped naked and marched into the showers, accompanied by dozens of other Jewesses. And then the gas started pumping into the chamber and they started to die. The little girl kept looking at me, as if she couldn’t believe what I’d done to her, until she collapsed and died. And after they were dead, we had to burn the bodies…”

He shuddered, violently. “Do you understand why I drink?”

Gudrun stared at him. She’d never imagined, not in her worst nightmares, that the state could do anything of the sort. Everything she’d been told had been curiously hygienic, as if the natives had merely disappeared after the Germans had arrived. And yet… it never occurred to her to doubt his words. They had the ring of truth and they chilled her to the bone.

She found her voice, somehow. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, they never trusted me after that,” Grandpa Frank said. “I had betrayed the Volk, you see, by making love to a Jewess. There was no hope of promotion. I took early retirement and went back to Berlin. Your grandmother was kind enough to marry me; I never told her the truth, of course, even when my nightmares drove her out of bed. We had the nastiest arguments before she fell pregnant and left her job. And then she died four years after your mother was born. I brought her up on my own. Never married again, either.”

He let go of Gudrun’s wrist. “Every time I close my eyes, I see her face,” he muttered, reaching for the bottle. “If I remain drunk all the time, it helps… I keep thinking about killing myself, but what good would that do?”

“I don’t know,” Gudrun said. It had been easy to dismiss Grandpa Frank when he’d just been a disgusting old man. Now… now she wasn’t sure what to think. “But what else can you do?”

“I was taught that suicide was a mortal sin,” Grandpa Frank said. “And yet, surely what we did in the Einsatzgruppen was even worse.

“We told ourselves that they were subhuman. We told ourselves that we were strong and they were weak and the strong had rights to use the weak as they saw fit. We told ourselves that their mere existence was a threat to the Reich, that they had to be destroyed to save ourselves from certain destruction. And yet, after what I did, I can no longer believe it…”

His voice trailed off. “You wrote that leaflet,” Grandpa Frank said. “And you could possibly pass for a BDM girl if you wore your uniform and kept your eyes downcast.”

“I did,” Gudrun confirmed. There was no point in trying to deny it. “Grandpa…”

“The state isn’t going to let you get away with it,” Grandpa Frank hissed. “They’ve buried so many would-be reformers over the years. Don’t ever underestimate how far they’re prepared to go to root out all opposition to their rule. But don’t stop. Don’t let them get away with it.”

He leaned back in his bed. “I told myself there was nothing I could do,” he whispered, as he closed his eyes. “And at the time, maybe I was right.”

Gudrun waited, her heart pounding in her chest, but he said nothing else. She checked his breathing – for a moment, she thought he’d finally let go of life and surrendered to death – and then relaxed as she realised it was stable. Rising to her feet, she walked out the door and headed down to her room. Suddenly, the threat of her father’s anger seemed unimportant, compared to what she’d been told. She felt sick to even consider her grandfather having an affair with anyone…

But he wasn’t an old man at the time, she told herself, as she closed the door behind her – there was no point in locking it – and sat down on the bed. He wouldn’t have been much older than Kurt.

Her thoughts were so jumbled up that it was a relief when she heard someone tapping at the door. She braced herself, grimly prepared to take whatever punishment her father decided to mete out, then blinked in surprise as Kurt opened the door and stepped into the room. He was holding the leaflet in one hand.

“You may as well read it,” he said, as he closed the door. “I managed to talk father out of beating you, but it would probably be better if you didn’t show your face until tomorrow.”

Gudrun swallowed. “Thank you,” she said, as she took the leaflet. It was identical to the leaflets she’d handed out only a few hours ago. “What did you say to him?”

“Told him you’d jump to the worst possible conclusion, because that’s what girls do,” Kurt said. He ignored the rude gesture she aimed at him. “And that you probably thought Konrad was mentioned by name.”

He lowered his voice. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Gudrun.”

“I know,” Gudrun said. She looked up at him. “Are you going to betray me?”

“How could I without revealing that I sneaked into the hospital beside you?” Kurt asked, dryly. “You couldn’t have done it without me.”

That was true, Gudrun knew. But betraying the person who’d helped write and distribute the leaflets would probably have won him forgiveness. He wasn’t a student, after all; he was a Berlin Guardsman who was probably bound for South Africa soon…

“Thank you,” she said, instead. “I’m not going to stop.”

“I know,” Kurt said. “You’re as stubborn as father.”

“And if I wasn’t a girl, he’d have something to be proud of,” Gudrun snarled.

“He’s had a bad day,” Kurt reminded her. “The girls he had to round up would have been very like you – some of them might only be a year or two younger. He didn’t join the police for that.”

Gudrun shrugged as her brother patted her on the shoulder and rose, heading for the door. As far as she could tell, the Order Police were intended to push people around. Why else would anyone join up?

“Get some rest,” Kurt advised. “You have to go back to university tomorrow.”

“I know,” Gudrun said. “Thank you.”