The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

60 Whining Verboten! 1942

Mum didn’t arrive that day. Nor that night. The train pulled in shortly after midnight, dragged itself into the station like a mole with a twisted snout, and vomited a flood of faces. I swallowed hard as I stood there on platform 14, famished and newly armed. Every face bore the scars of hardship; people rushed towards the exit with their reinforced cases, as if it had just been announced that the station would blow up in five minutes. What a mass of people. What a load of eyes. What a multitude of beating hearts. It was as if a whole small nation had disembarked on a narrow platform and been given appointments in gas chambers for later that day. What did all these people want from this burning city? Why didn’t they just go and hide in a forest and live on homegrown beetroot until the front line had invisibly crossed their garden, leaving behind a black Audi and a white AEG washing machine?

Oh, dearest Mum. I couldn’t even remember what you looked like. Hadn’t seen you in over a year. Since the port of Dagebüll, like a pier puppet that slowly shrank to a dot, the full stop to my childhood. Using my eyes as if they were hands moulding clay, I tried as best I could to recompose my mother’s gentle expression from the myriad of faces – the hair from this one, nose from that one – but every imagined face immediately transformed itself into another, and moustaches and caps constantly distracted me from my search. How could God be so cruel? He had just squeezed two thousand women out of his iron sleeve, but he still couldn’t let one of them be my mother?

By the end I was starting to hate all those weary women who pressed themselves out of the dark night into the light of the station, which was nevertheless kept as dim as possible, with a camouflaged roof to outwit His Majesty’s bombers. I toyed with the urge to throw my bomb at this mash of eyes that endlessly poured into the station, that endlessly mocked the absence of my mother.

Finally, I was left standing alone on the platform, alone in that vast hall, and wondered whether I was entitled to cry a bit. But then I spotted a sign in Gothic letters, which in my agitated state I read as weinen verboten! – Whining forbidden! – so I turned back into the Wandelhalle and went looking for the Billettverkauf, which by then was closed, of course, since it was past midnight. I slid down on the dirty stone floor and leaned against the locked door, staring at the wall opposite me in despair: A billboard showed five smiling children waving out of a train window. The caption under it read: kommt mit in die kinderlandverschickung! – Let’s send our children into the country!

Why wasn’t I still in Amrum?

There were still some scattered people in the station. A well-hatted family was engaged in a loud discussion under the big clock. Around them, cases sat silently awaiting a decision on their accommodation for the night, while tenor male voices echoed from the gathering like sparks from a bonfire. Beyond the people, one could see out into a half-burned urban landscape decorated with flames. An elderly man hobbled across the hall on makeshift crutches. One of his trouser legs swept the floor. Passing him, a young, attractive, well-dressed couple swiftly came walking, most probably some Swedish members of the Social Democracy Party, who knew exactly where they were going. In those years in Germany, one never saw a couple or pair of lovers under the age of sixty. All the men were scattered far afield, busy killing or dying. I watched the couple storm past.

The thought of exclaiming a brief Nordic hallo to them crossed my mind – after all, these were, yes, almost my people – but I didn’t want to disturb that beautifully important air they exuded. And I’ve always felt like that about the Swedes (even after three of them proposed to me on a ship on the same night). They considered themselves to be superior to other nations, and they were, of course. Having invaded half of Europe in previous centuries, they had moved on from those warring tendencies and now contented themselves with the production of ‘neutral weapons’ for others to use and financed Nobel Peace Prizes to alleviate some of the guilt that entailed.

The young man glanced at me as they dashed past, and what did he see but a forsaken Icelander in the corner, a dirty, emaciated wreck in a blue skirt, helpless in front of the locked gates of the world. I observed them as they moved towards the eastern exit of the hall. The night would be their ally; in the consulate’s bed they would be shielded from all bombs, and between silk sheets they would conjure up good ministerial material. Yes, I could have sworn they were some prime minister’s future parents.

A moment later I found an armed guard, if not a soldier, looming above me. A wooden-headed boy with a square face, thick lips and pale eyebrows under an oversized helmet. He ordered me to the nearest air-raid shelter. Hadn’t I heard the alarm? That showed you what a state I was in, the fact that I hadn’t heard the sirens.

‘I’m waiting here for my mother. She… she’s a prison warden in the Fuhlsbüttel camp… but gets the weekend off. We’re going to… watch the air raids.’

With a hand grenade in my luggage, I had grown more confident. I didn’t even stand up to answer this Nazimodo, who swallowed the information by nodding his big-eyed wooden head and even smiled at this good and obedient Nazi child. Nevertheless, he was about to say, ‘But…’ when he was interrupted by an explosion. We both turned our heads out of the hall. At the other end the family meeting scattered, and people grabbed their cases. Fires reignited outside in the dark ruins, and in the close distance we could hear the whistle of falling bombs as they plunged vertically through the night sky, the way our common snipes do back home, and then produced those deafening bangs as they built their nodular nests on the rooftops and harbour warehouses. Damned Brits.

‘But… unfortunately, there are no more trains tonight. Not until the Kiel train comes in the morning at six fifteen. You have to leave. No one is allowed to stay here tonight. You must go to an air-raid shelter.’

‘Why aren’t you in the war?’

How cheeky I’d become.

‘Huh?’ the startled Nazimodo asked.

‘Why aren’t you in the war? My father’s in the war. All real men are in the war.’

‘In the war? I am in the war. I’m taking care of the station.’

‘That’s good. Then I’ll stay here.’

That was the right answer, because he seemed content and wandered away. But I continued sitting there and must have looked like the Kid in Chaplin’s film.

And that made sense, because a short time later he was the man who appeared to me.