The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

59 Hamburg Central 1942

Seldom has such a splendid building hosted a more dreadful event than the one witnessed in the Central Station of Hamburg in March 1942. Oh, dear me. Do I really have to drag this up again?

My father and I slowly made our way through the ruins of the city at the crack of dawn, observing the semi-destroyed buildings and downtrodden faces. Some factories were burning in the distance. The station still seemed to be in one piece, however, and we followed the stream of people entering it. We found platform 14 and stood there in silence, I full of anticipation, he full of dread.

But the train Mum was on didn’t arrive at 12:02 as the timetable had promised. Fifteen minutes later an announcement resounded against the steel ceiling: Owing to a malfunction on the line, the train would be delayed by two hours. But an hour later, new information appeared on the board, extending the delay by four hours. Dad squinted his eyes, peering into the hinterland of iron and rails, and pulled out a cigarette, discreetly, because this German soldier was smoking English cigarettes that I had procured for him in Amrum: the previous week the girls and I had found the carcass of a plane on the shore, which contained four cartons of Chesterfields, almost dry. He lit it with an SS match, however.

He was stuck in a conundrum. He was supposed to report back to the barracks in Berlin at midnight, when his leave expired. His train was scheduled to leave at 3:32 p.m. You couldn’t mess with German discipline: if Dad returned later, his Hitler salute would have been axed. But he couldn’t abandon his daughter in a dilapidated train station in a city in ruins, which was being pounded by a thousand bombs every night. Mind you, she was twelve years old now, soon to be thirteen. He drew on his cigarette out of restlessness and despair, locked in his thoughts, while I tried to enjoy the smell of the smoke. Few things were as good as the scent of tobacco in fresh air.

Dad cast away the cigarette, killing it with his military boots, and sighed heavily as he looked down at the tracks that extended all the way to Lübeck.

‘Damn it.’

‘That’s all right, Dad, I can just wait here.’

He looked at me. A glimmer of hope flashed across his marineblue eyes. Maybe he didn’t need to choose between his daughter and Hitler? Maybe she was right? Maybe it would be all right? But the glimmer vanished just as fast.

‘I’m just not sure that train… they may have bombed the line… those damned Brits.’

‘Have they blown up the tracks? Do you think…?’

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head in the hope that his thoughts, which had spun into a chaotic muddle, would be shaken back into place again, in a slightly more rational order. ‘Don’t know.’

Dad glanced at his watch. It was two minutes to three. It was now or never. All of a sudden he slung his bag over his shoulder, told me to grab mine, and then swiftly led me away from platform 14 into the main hall, past a newspaper kiosk and a small elderly lady who was selling roses.

God Almighty, I still remember that flower woman, smiling with her rosy cheeks like God’s only daughter, offering colours to the grey and war-weary multitudes. Where did she find flowers in Hamburg, where every garden was buried under rubble? In her flinty black eyes I read her secret: She got them from her church, her roofless church. In her galoshes she clambered over the mounds of dust that had once been a brick facade but now covered the church steps like a coat of Icelandic lava, and she tiptoed along the floor, climbing over roof fragments, into the choir stalls, where she knelt before the altar and stretched her arm beyond it, into a hole from which she pulled out the flowers that the good Lord sent her from His celestial garden through a pneumatic tube, like the messages that were exchanged between offices before the war. Apparently this was the good man’s only contribution to the Second World War.

Dad dragged me down a dark tunnel, which stank of pee and led to two toilets. We waited for the traffic at the door to abate (a chubby-calved woman wobbled out of the ladies’ room, and a coated man with a stub in his mouth wandered into the men’s), and then Dad bent over his bag, swiftly pulled a heavy steel spherical object out of it, and handed it to me.

‘Take this. It’s a hand bomb, a grenade. You hold it in your right hand, like this. Then pull out the safety pin with the other, like this… you pull it off here… and then throw it away from you. You have to remember to throw it away. Remember that. Throw it away. Then it explodes. See, you do it like this. And then you throw yourself on the ground as soon as you’ve thrown it. Got that?’

I nodded. Although he’d explained it far too fast. He seemed to agree, for he went over the instructions again.

‘I’m giving it to you for your protection, Herra. Remember that. And you should use it only in an emergency. Understand? Only when your life is in danger. If you’re surrounded by Brits. But you have to be one hundred per cent sure you’re in danger, because you have only one bomb. Eine einzige Bombe. Do you understand?’

I nodded again and stared at the steel egg in my palm. A whole war had been handed to me. It was so heavy, as heavy as… a heart. Where was I supposed to keep it?

‘Where are you going, Dad?’

‘I… I’m going where… I need to go. I just obey. Most likely the eastern front. We all have to support the struggle, Herra, remember that. The world can’t be de-Germanised again. And this brings great hope for us, too, for Iceland. Hitler looks on Iceland as the original source of the Teutonic race, he looks on us as the custodians of the flame.’

As he completed those last words, he squeezed his palms around the bomb in my hand and shook it for greater emphasis. ‘Custodians of the flame.’ When he loosened his grip, I stared at the grenade and felt like a mythological statue guarding the spark of life.

‘But Dad, who’ll win the war?’

‘We will, of course. Hitler.’

‘But when?’

‘In the summer. It’ll all be over in the summer. Once we’ve taken Russia. Then the others will surrender. Then we’ll all meet in autumn and move to Moscow. They’ve promised me a post at the university there. They’ll be setting up a department for Germanic studies and the Nordic section all to myself. The world is ours, Herra. Copenhagen, Berlin, Moscow… What do you think of that?’

Not a lot. This was the third time he was telling me this, in the exact same words. He seemed to sense my scepticism and added a line I hadn’t heard before.

‘Imagine, Herra. Russia… You’ll be an elegant lady, go ice skating and study piano, travel in a horse-drawn carriage, stroll through the city in a mink fur, just like Anna Karenina!’

All of a sudden the door of the ladies’ room swung open and a grand Nazi Frau stepped out with a swaying behind. She didn’t notice us, but Dad straightened up.

‘Listen… don’t hold it like that… people mustn’t see it. Here… let’s put it in your bag.’

‘But doesn’t it explode if… can’t it explode?’

‘No, only if you remove the pin. No, keep it in your pocket instead. No, well, in the bag might be better. There, yes. It’ll be all right. Hitler is with us.’

And here the child asked, ‘Does he know I have this…?’

And the child answered the child: ‘The Führer watches over everything. He’s everywhere. He knows everything.’

Then he became an adult again and gazed at length into my eyes.

‘Take care, Herra, love. Daddy has to go. And remember to wait here on platform 14, you know where it is. And if the train doesn’t come, wait by the Billettverkauf. Your mother and I agreed that if something came up we would meet there. The Billettverkauf. It’s where they sell the tickets. Tickets for the trains, die Fahrkarten. You know that, right? Good. It’s there in front of the main hall, the Wandelhalle.’

And then he grabbed my head with both hands, as he knelt on one knee before me, and said to me in an altogether different and more Icelandic tone: ‘Oh, sweet God. My child…’

The loudspeaker announced the imminent departure of train 235 to Berlin from platform 9. It also announced some tears. His sky-blue eyes welled with sea and he pulled me into an embrace before I could see anything flow out of them.

‘God bless you and protect you, my child. I… I love you, you know that.’

He had started to cry now, and his voice quivered.

‘You must never forget that your father loves you.’

I felt his body sobbing against mine like an old car engine against a cold-water tank. He now realised he was about to leave his only daughter in a train station in a big city, at the mercy of everything, in the middle of a war, just so that he could get a chance to make her fatherless. I didn’t cry. I had a mission now. I’d become the torch-bearer of the Germanic race. A custodian of the flame. I couldn’t permit myself to shed a tear on that sacred fire.

‘God be with you,’ he repeated finally, before he abruptly broke out of the embrace, trying to pull himself together by swallowing twice and vigorously rubbing his face. He was in a risky position. Although it wasn’t explicitly stated in the military rules of the Third Reich, he knew of two SS men who had been executed for the mere crime of shedding a tear.

‘Right, I must go now. Goodbye.’

He swung the bag over his shoulder, stood up, and took several steps away from me, casting a swift glance at his watch. Before he could turn his back on me, I said, ‘Dad!’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re not allowed to die! Remember that.’

He froze for an instant and opened his mouth as if he were about to answer, but then closed it just as fast, not just because he didn’t know what to say, but also to prevent his eyes from watering again. He stretched his clamped lips into a forced smile and exhaled noisily through his nose, as if he thought that my words would best be answered by the breath of life.

Then he was off to the eastern front to hand more arms to the rising sun. I could see the soles of his shoes as he ran down the passageway. They were white, but one of them had been blackened by the burn of a cigarette.