Berlin letters, p.1
Berlin Letters, page 1
Information about External Hyperlinks in this ebook
Please note that the endnotes in this ebook may contain hyperlinks to external websites as part of bibliographic citations. These hyperlinks have not been activated by the publisher, who cannot verify the accuracy of these links beyond the date of publication
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue: Monica Voekler
Chapter 1: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Haris Voekler
Chapter 5: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Haris Voekler
Chapter 9: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12: Haris Voekler
Chapter 13: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 14
Chapter 15: Haris Voekler
Chapter 16: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19: Haris Voekler
Chapter 20: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23: Haris Voekler
Chapter 24: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 25: Haris Voekler
Chapter 26: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 27: Haris Voekler
Chapter 28: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 29
Chapter 30: Luisa Voekler
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise for Katherine Reay
Also by Katherine Reay
Copyright
Prologue
Monica Voekler
East Berlin, Germany
Sunday, August 13, 1961
The jangling telephone broke into her dreams.
As Haris climbed from bed with a groan, Monica felt the cool air touch her skin. Today would be another hot day, but it wasn’t hot yet. It wasn’t fully light yet. It was too dark for calls or climbing from bed. Too dark for anything but sleep.
She sat up and looked to the clock, but she couldn’t separate its black hands from the room’s deep grey.
Was it Luisa?
Monica lifted her chin and closed her eyes to listen. After recently moving from her crib to a “big girl bed,” their three-year-old daughter had been getting up and wandering the apartment at night. Haris often found her curled up fast asleep in the hallway, or nestled under the kitchen table, or, most terrifyingly, tucked near the toilet.
Monica disentangled her feet from the covers as another ring reverberated through the apartment. Haris shuffled into the kitchen, grumbling, before he lifted the receiver from its cradle. His tense, urgent tone emerged barely above a whisper.
Her husband walked back into the bedroom, all shuffling gone. Haris reached for his pants, thrown over the room’s only chair, and pulled them on with such haste, he lost his balance and dropped into the chair. It scraped against the hardwood.
“What’s the matter? Where are you going?” Standing now, she grabbed the clock and held it close to her face: 4:00 a.m.
“Potsdamer Platz. It started there late last night, and it’s almost completed.”
“Another riot? What’s completed?”
“Not a riot, but I hardly know. A barricade of sorts. Koch called it an Antifaschistischer Schutzwall.”
“What is an anti-Fascist protection barrier?” Monica’s head felt muddled. “How can you have a physical barrier to an ideology?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out. Koch wants an article for the afternoon edition. General Secretary Ulbricht called him personally. Whatever this is, it’s been in the works for some time. Thousands of soldiers flooded the city last night to construct this thing. That takes coordination and planning.”
With pants pulled above his narrow hips and still working the buttons on his shirt, Haris stepped toward her and dropped a kiss atop her head. His dark hair, though short, was still ruffled at the crown from sleep. “Go back to bed. I’ll be back soon. If I don’t make it before you leave for lunch, tell your parents I’m sorry.”
“As usual then?” Her tone came out sharper than she intended. His face was so close she could look up and see a muscle flicker in his jaw, clenched against reacting, no doubt.
“Don’t.” He sighed. “Not this morning.”
“At least try to come for lunch.” She reached for his hand. “It’s been over a month.”
“If they wanted to see us, they shouldn’t have moved away.”
“Not again.” She climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up around herself. “Everyone is moving away, Haris. We should at least consider it.”
While not mathematically true, it felt true. And it was concerning. Haris learned the numbers at the newspaper and had repeated them to her. She suspected he regretted that slip, as it bolstered her position rather than his own, but there was little he could do about that now. Besides, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t noticed. Everyone had noticed. Last month alone more than thirty thousand Deutsche Demokratische Republik citizens had come through Berlin’s Soviet Sector, commonly called East Berlin, then crossed into one of the city’s western sectors—most often the American one—and left forever. Haris’s newspaper, Neues Deutschland, didn’t print that number, of course, but that didn’t make it any less real. The paper also hadn’t printed that the DDR had lost a full 20 percent of its population since 1949. Yet that was real too.
“No, Monica. Our lives, our work, it’s all here.” Haris exited the room, calling back over his shoulder, “And I’m not getting fired over a luncheon with your parents.”
Monica curled against her pillow and hoped for another hour or two of sleep before Luisa awoke. Their ever-present quarrel wasn’t worth losing sleep over.
Haris had not returned by midmorning.
Monica fed Luisa breakfast, bathed her, and played dolls with her to pass the time. Then at eleven o’clock she dressed her daughter in her best dress, loaded her into her pram, and maneuvered them both out their building’s front door, down the few stairs, and onto Rheinsberger Strasse.
It was a beautiful summer morning. One full of rare sun. A perfect day to walk the several blocks to the American Sector—West Berlin—rather than take the S-Bahn.
After a few steps, Monica noticed a strange hum in the air. More people traversed the street than on a normal Sunday. They walked quickly, anxiously. Some carried trash bags. Some carried suitcases. And while those moving in haste were mostly traveling her direction, others were walking more slowly with tears and stricken expressions—walking toward her, past her, and away from the train station and border crossing.
Border crossing.
Monica shook her head. It was hardly a border. There were signs, “You are now leaving the Democratic Sector of Berlin,” to mark one’s steps from the Soviet to American Sectors and a few bored guards who might comment occasionally, but nothing more. In fact, a few close friends lived on Bernauer Strasse, a unique street in which the building was in the Soviet Sector but the sidewalk right outside the front door was in the American. Those friends simply walked out their doors without nodding to any guard at all.
Life passed between the sectors with hardly a pause—along with telephone lines, electricity wires, train tracks. In fact, one could live in one and work in another, and many did. The Soviet-backed SED government didn’t like its citizens earning and bringing Western currency into the Soviet Sector, but there was little they could do about it. It was still one city, after all. Berlin.
It was true, however, that the border had been more problematic in the past. Monica remembered the year 1949, during which the Soviet Union decided to close off West Berlin from the West altogether. Nothing could arrive by road or rail to the American, British, and French sections of the city without passing through a hundred miles of DDR territory. They were left with only two fly routes, but the West proved indomitable. Using those two fly zones, they dropped all needed provisions into the city by flying planes over it every thirty-one seconds for an entire year. The DDR finally had to cave because they were the ones hurting—they needed raw goods from the West.
Monica knew people left, of course, thousands of them, but she wasn’t entirely sure why. Other than the fact that she missed her parents, she did enjoy her life in East Berlin. Like Haris had said, their lives were good. Work during the week occupied her. And though she hadn’t chosen that job, she did enjoy it, and the rest of her time was filled with her daughter, her husband, evenings with friends, and Sunday lunches with her parents.
She paused with her hands clutching the pram’s handlebar as a government announcement blared over the neighborhood’s emergency loudspeakers. It was the same announcement she’d vaguely heard from inside their apartment several times already.
“. . . Bornholmer Strasse, Brunnenstrasse, Chausseestrasse . . . The border between East and West Berlin has been closed.”
Closed? She looked around, expecting others to react with equal incredulity. A city can’t be closed. There are no barriers to close.
No one reacted with surprise. They simply hurried on.
Monica smiled at her daughter and continued toward the border crossing. It was ludicrous. A mistake. She turned the corner onto Brunnenstrasse and jolted the pram to such an abrupt stop Luisa lurched back.
With wide eyes the three-year-old pulled herself upright.
“Shhh . . .” Unable to pull her focus from the sight in front of her, Monica reached down and handed Luisa her sewn doll that had fallen forgotten into her lap.
Straight ahead and across Brunnenstrasse at the Bernauer Strasse corner, Monica counted a dozen guards dressed in the green uniform of the German police, the Volkspolizei, and a couple more dressed in the MfS grey. Whatever this was, it required both the VoPo and the Stasi. Each of the VoPo carried a machine gun slung over his shoulder. The sight was so shocking, it took her a moment to shift her gaze from the men to the mass behind them.
Barbed wire coiled in large loops across the street.
Monica felt, rather than saw, a man stop beside her. She glanced over. He reminded her of her father with his grey hair and his formal felt hat pushed low onto his brow. His eyes narrowed as if he was thinking or simply trying to see more clearly.
“What’s happened here?” she whispered.
“They did it. They finally built their prison.” The man scrubbed his hands across his eyes. It looked as if he hoped the action would wipe away the reality in front of them. His eyes widened in alarm when it didn’t, and without another word, he turned around and shuffled away.
Monica stepped forward. Her parents had moved only a couple months before and only a few blocks into West Berlin. Surely she could pass through for a luncheon.
A full ten meters from Bernauer Strasse, a guard waved and yelled to her, “Get away. Go back.”
“I’m having lunch with my parents. They live just down to the left.” She blinked and corrected herself. “Across that, then to the left.”
The young soldier turned to follow her pointed finger, as if he, too, might see her parents’ new building on the other side of the tangled wire. Her eyes dropped with her finger, and she noted cans scattered across the pavement. Tear gas cans. She remembered them from the 1953 riot at Potsdamer Platz.
She hadn’t been there that day when the Soviet tanks rolled in, but she’d seen cans still scattered across the plaza a week later when she accompanied Haris to gather details for a huge newspaper assignment, his last in a series of articles covering the now-infamous June 17 protest.
What had horrified her that day fascinated Haris. They’d just started dating, and his attitude was one thing that drew her to him. Soviet aggression terrified her but not Haris. She’d tried to learn from his confident and cavalier demeanor but never had.
Even now, seeing Soviet guards a block away, long-dormant memories of her family reaching Berlin in 1945 crept near the surface. Memories of the June Potsdamer Platz riot too. Her father had been injured that day. Merely crossing the plaza to reach home, he’d almost lost his leg in the crush as Soviet tanks bore down on the protesters.
Haris held no such fears. The Potsdamer Platz riots had been his big break at Neues Deutschland, and he saw the Soviets, the protests, and his opportunities in a different light. “Sometimes a forceful message must be sent.”
Haris and her father barely spoke following those published articles and the awards and promotions Haris received because of them.
Monica took a sharp breath to draw herself from her reverie to the situation at hand. She faced the guard. “They’ll worry if we’re late.”
“The border is closed. No one crosses.” Another soldier joined him. This one was older, and while approaching, he looped his arm around his Kalashnikov and gently rested his hand near the trigger.
Monica stepped back. He stepped forward.
She spun Luisa away and raced home. The pram bounced over the uneven pavement, some of it not fully replaced and smoothed since the war. The jagged terrain made Luisa laugh. Monica, however, did not laugh. As she took in the people around her, she began to see what was happening. They were trying to breach the wire and escape or, barring that, they were trudging home in defeat.
She stopped at the S-Bahn station and reached out to a woman trudging down the steps from the platform. “Is the train crossing over?”
The woman’s eyes were wide and red. Her lips trembled as she answered. “It is closed. The sign says the last station is Rosenthaler Platz. If you look, they cut the wires.” The woman waved her hand up and behind her.
Monica could see the severed wires above the tracks hanging loose.
“They pushed us back with clubs.”
Without waiting for more, Monica continued home, yanked Luisa from the pram, and, leaving it on the street, dashed up the three flights to their apartment and their telephone. The dial tone was normal. She dialed Haris’s office at the newspaper. No one picked up. She dialed her parents. The line went dead. She dialed again. And again, the line went dead.
Monica gathered Luisa, handed her a cookie, descended the stairs, and dropped her into the pram once more. This time she headed north toward Strelitzer Strasse, a quieter street that also crossed Bernauer Strasse into West Berlin. At the corner she again found a mass of barbed wire, but with only two guards protecting it.
Across the street, her parents, Gertrude and Walther, and her younger sister, Alice, frantically waved to her.
She ran forward and the guards turned her direction. “Get—”
Monica cut the young guard off with a smile. “Please. I’m just talking. I’m only—”
He turned away before she finished. At first she thought he didn’t want to engage with her. Then she noticed a commotion a block away on Brunnenstrasse. It looked as if a child, a young boy about five years old in blue shorts, stood alone near the guards in the center of the street. Shifting her gaze in the direction of each guard’s focus, Monica saw what she surmised were his parents calling to him—from across the wire.
The boy ran to the barricade, only to be thrown back by the guard. The parents started wailing across the street, the mother keening in her husband’s arms. As if deaf, the VoPo did not turn toward the mother. They kept their attention fixed to the east, on the boy and on the gathering crowd. Twice more the child tried to run. Twice more he was captured within the guard’s grasp and slung back.
With no one watching them, Monica’s parents, along with Alice, joined her at the barricade. Monica almost reached out to her father, needing his reassurance that all would be well. If her father said something was true, Monica believed him.
“What’s going on?” She spoke to him alone.
“West Berlin is surrounded. In one night. We are on an island now, fully separated from the DDR and from you. They’re calling this an ‘anti-Fascist protection barrier,’ and claim it’s necessary to keep unsavory Western influences away from their pure ideology. They want to keep you and all DDR citizens in as much as they want to keep us out.”
His words struck Monica as familiar, almost identical to Haris’s description hours earlier.
“The agreement was to divide the city but to always allow its citizens to move freely between the sectors,” her father continued. “But it was never written, never codified. Only assumed. And now too many people are using East Berlin as their escape hatch into the West.”
His voice sounded weary and defeated but not surprised. Monica felt that same childhood assurance she had growing up. Her father would know what to do.
“What should I do? What’s going to happen?” she asked, fully expecting him to smile and ease her fears. “Wait a few days,” he might say. “All will be well.”
Instead Father shook his head. “I don’t know. I doubt America or Great Britain will risk going to war over this, over us. During the blockade they dropped food, but they never pushed the Soviets to let up. Instead the Soviets gave up. That’s very different. No . . . They won’t fight for us.”
“But will it come down?” Monica pressed for reassurance. “People work across the border. Families are divided. They can’t leave us like this.”
Father didn’t give it to her. Mother looked away. Alice bit her lip, tears running down her face.
“What?” Monica reached out again. The barbed wire snagged her wrist. She snatched her arm back as blood flowed in a thin line to her elbow. Her mother pressed her palm firmly against her mouth, eyes full of tears and fear.
Father shook his head again. “A few minutes before you arrived, a VoPo called out that this is permanent. He said their plan is to fortify it within the coming days. To make it not a wire border but a physical wall. It’s not coming down within days, Monica. Perhaps not even within months.”
