Table of Contents
Table of Contents
The Great Illusion
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VI
VII
VIII
IX
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XII
XIII
XIV
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XVIII
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XXI
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The Great Illusion
SIMONE MALACRIDA
“ The Great Illusion”
Simone Malacrida (1977)
Engineer and writer, has worked on research, finance, energy policy and industrial plants.
INDICE ANALITICO
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I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
In the book there are very specific historical references to facts, events and people. Such events and characters actually happened and existed (with the exception of Gunter Schabowski 's press conference which was not broadcast live).
On the other hand, the main protagonists are the result of the author's pure imagination and do not correspond to real individuals, just as their actions did not actually happen. It goes without saying that, for these characters, any reference to people or things is purely coincidental.
The love between Klaus and Uma, children of Slavic émigrés in Berlin, collides with the Twentieth Century and emerges defeated.
Crushed by a cumbersome past and the looming present, they cannot have a future together, but only two individual lives, separated by the Wall, erected in the middle of officially pacified Europe with no declared wars.
Their story will resume, with tragic implications, after reunification and the illusion of a world finally free of confrontation and violence.
The rush of events will overwhelm their generation and the next, particularly the lives of Franz and Olga, who are inextricably linked to a Destiny that has quietly worked in the shadows throughout the century, marking the events and decisions of grandparents, fathers, sons and grandchildren.
“Happiness and peace of heart arise from conscience
to do what we think is right and proper,
and not from doing what others say and do.”
Gandhi
I
I
Berlin, June - August 1961
––––––––
“Are you still going out, Klaus?”
Paula scowled at her son.
The boy had now become a man, leaping upwards and assuming an initial muscle mass of a certain relief. He had inherited these characteristics from his father.
Dario Novak had always been endowed with a notable build, at least that's how Paula remembered who, by now, had known him for twenty years. Much had changed in their lives; perhaps too much compared to their expectations as young people.
At the time, Paula Klinger was stationed as a nurse in Croatia following the Wehrmacht, the army of the Third Reich.
There she had immediately noticed that local boy, belonging to the militia. Their love blossomed with the same joy as an expanse of tulips and the first tangible sign was Klaus, born in Zagreb when the Axis troops were already retreating from various fronts.
Looking into his eyes, Paula glimpsed Dario's reflections in the shiny black.
Klaus only nodded to his mother and went to the room where his sister Helga was.
Unlike what the boy experienced, the girl had not seen, even as a baby, the destruction of Berlin, her hometown. In 1949 the post-war reconstruction works were almost completed.
In memory of the young girl, Berlin was never subjected to bombing. She hadn't seen the gutted houses, the rubble completely submerging the streets, the totally unrecognizable squares.
Not that Klaus could remember, but somehow he was a child of another era. Six years of difference was enough to trace a furrow, especially if 1945 had been involved.
Paula and Dario, on the other hand, remembered well the destruction and the bombs.
After the war, they decided to reside in the American occupation zone, near Gitschiner Strasse .
Helga brightened as she saw her brother enter.
For her, Klaus was something of a beacon. She felt protected by his presence and their closeness.
The girl had inherited her mother's physical features, with a fair complexion and slightly wavy blond hair.
She was the only one in the family who knew about Klaus' big secret.
“Are you going to visit her even today?”
Helga would never reveal such a secret to anyone, least of all her parents.
She knew that by doing so, even she could, in the future, count on Klaus for a similar favor.
The brother gave a nod of understanding and then hugged her.
"I have to run, otherwise I'll be late."
He didn't even put on his overcoat.
It was early June and it was quite warm in Berlin.
The continental climate and the absence of clouds were a comfort to that decision.
In any case, he would have had to return before dinner and therefore the temperature would have remained pleasant.
Seeing him leave the house in a hurry, Paula felt a moment of discomfort.
Her son was almost definitively freeing himself from the presence and relationship with her and her husband.
It was a necessary and completely obvious stage, moreover she herself had made the same choice at eighteen, enrolling in the nursing course, but somehow she had thought of putting that moment away forever.
She didn't know what it was. Or at least, perhaps she had guessed it, but she didn't want to ask too many questions. Her generation had grown up without asking too many questions and without saying, clearly and explicitly, everything they knew or could have said.
For this reason, she did not stop her son to ask him more.
Klaus descended the stairs from the third floor with such ardor that, if anyone had appeared in his path, he would have overwhelmed him violently.
He was late.
He knew that the appointment on Heine Strasse was closer to his home, but he was also sure that Uma, despite the longer walk, would already be there.
Uma was his big secret. Uma was his great love.
He loved everything about her.
Her physical appearance, with her somewhat oriental features, slightly protruding cheekbones, elongated face, eyes that are not exactly round.
Her way of speaking, with a totally Berlin accent, despite the different origins of his family.
Her way of walking, sinuous and lithe.
Her thoughts, which ranged from the infinitely small of everyday life to the great philosophical and humanistic discourses.
And then, his long straight hair and a thousand other details that only he remembered so meticulously.
Just in the presence of her smile, Klaus felt satisfied and completely intoxicated.
They spent whole afternoons talking, walking around their adopted city and kissing.
There was no square in Berlin where they hadn't kissed.
Despite the decidedly fast pace, the boy arrived after Uma, who was already waiting "in their place", at any intersection of Heine Strasse .
He saw her from afar and his heart fluttered.
Uma smiled and spread her arms to welcome him.
“Have you been here long?”
The girl shook her head.
She wouldn't confess to anyone, not even Klaus, who had been anxiously waiting for almost half an hour.
She used to always arrive early for every appointment.
"It's farther from my house and then you know I walk slowly..." she tried to justify herself.
Klaus brushed her hair and kissed her.
Several times he had accompanied her near her home, leaving her alone in Alexander Platz .
He had never ventured to go as far as the building on Schonhauser Allee, for fear of running into her parents.
“We will have to overcome this mistrust in introducing ourselves to families...” Uma said to herself, but she was aware of some possible obstacles.
Her parents were ardent supporters of real socialism, which is why they had decided to follow the Red Army and settle in the Soviet occupation zone.
Conversely, she had never been interested in politics. She was passionate about art and would have liked to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. Much more likely, however, she would have ended up enrolling in Architecture.
"There is so much to build, my daughter" so used to say her father Slobodan, who was now well over forty, but who still rejoiced as when, as a boy, he had learned the rudiments of the principles of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia .
Slobodan had a real feeling of sharing communist ideals, classless society and aversion to capital.
Not even the exodus of thousands of fellow Berlin citizens towards western areas of influence had affected him. On the contrary, he was increasingly struck and saddened by it.
“Enemies of the people,” he called them.
His wife Helena, a petite woman whose hair and eyes immediately stood out, never entered into such considerations.
It was enough for her to see their children grow up in the best possible way.
She was responsible for the impeccable education of Uma and her younger brother, thirteen-year-old Mikhail, who, unlike Helga, was unaware of his sister's secret.
“What are Ulbricht and the other leaders of the DDR waiting for to stop these counter-revolutionaries?” Slobodan Tanjevic was particularly annoyed that day.
He didn't like Khrushchev, the Undisputed Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, meeting Kennedy.
He saw no good in talking to the enemy. And then why in Vienna and not in Berlin?
He knew what the capitalists and the bourgeois were like. He had seen them at work in Second World War, when they massacred the Serbs, just because they were historical friends of the Russians.
And he had also seen them in Berlin, with their worldly luxuries and their beautiful cars. No respect for others, no value for the community.
The DDR was and would be his and his family's future.
“How beautiful our DDR is...” he had repeatedly stated to Helena.
That day Uma had left before home. She was impervious to those phrases, but she didn't want to upset her father.
She knew her mother would never discuss politics or anything like that, and she didn't much like getting into these discussions.
For Uma, only the love she had for Klaus and their future together mattered.
Everything else was secondary.
"Come on, let's move..."
Klaus took her by the arm and invited her to follow him.
In two weeks it would have been their first anniversary and they planned to spend a day completely together.
But neither of them knew how he would justify such a prolonged absence from the family.
They headed for Potsdamer Platz .
“What was the city like before the bombings?”
Uma wondered.
Berlin had completely changed. Of the Berlin of the Third Reich, and before that of Weimar or Prussian Berlin, not much remained.
For the two young people, it was hard to think that the whole town planning was so recent.
And the various districts of Berlin could be distinguished at a glance.
The rebuilding had been chaotic and messy. Each sector of expertise had followed its own architectural line.
"It's as if there were four different cities..." Uma commented.
Klaus remained silent to listen to her.
He had never been a great speaker, he was better with numbers.
And then Uma's voice, its sound and its timbre, were something like no other.
They spent an enchanted afternoon, going into a couple of shops.
The first sold vinyl records and even allowed them to be listened to, having created separate, almost totally soundproofed rooms.
Klaus liked rhythms from America.
He was a fan of Elvis Presley.
Uma did not share this judgment. That singer didn't tell him much, she considered him more of a showman.
The girl didn't have a culture of modern music and used meetings with her lover to keep up with the times.
In the East certain things were no longer allowed.
“You came back late...”, it seemed that Paula had counted down the minutes of that absence.
Klaus thought his mother was starting to suspect.
How would they take it in the family?
He wasn't sure of the possible reaction.
His parents loved each other and knew the power of love and what it was like to be in love, but that wasn't what worried him.
Above all, he feared confrontation with those who had chosen a different perspective.
From Uma's speeches he knew of her father's socialist leanings.
On the other hand, he was aware that his father thought diametrically opposite.
For Dario Novak, communism was the "Evil Empire" and it was necessary to oppose it in every way.
He had never understood why they had decided to reside in Berlin.
If they really hated communism, why stand there a few meters away from the enemy, when all of Federal Germany was at your disposal? Why not move to Hamburg or Munich or Cologne or Düsseldorf?
"You know that your mother worked in the hospital..." Dario once tried to reply to his son who raised this objection.
As if there were no hospitals in other cities in Germany!
And it had been years now that his mother hadn't served in the hospital, but only with some doctors in Berlin, of course by those who practiced in the fields of competence of the Allies.
"From those communists, you don't have to take even a mark..." thus had sentenced Dario Novak.
Paula had been happy to leave the hospital. Private nurse pay at some doctor's offices was higher and with a lower workload.
At dinner, there was usually little talk.
Mainly about Klaus and Helga's studies and what happened today. Nothing concerning the work of Paula and even less of Dario, archivist stationed at an anonymous German logistics company.
They had a television, used mostly for listening to the news.
Dario didn't take the meeting between Kennedy and Khrushchev well.
To him, America was superior and he shouldn't stoop to bargaining.
Furthermore, the negotiation was not something distant and abstract, but closely concerned the situation in Berlin.
His convictions had been put to the test only a few years earlier, with the events of Sputnik and Gagarin.
At that moment, he had the doubt that the Communists could be further ahead in progress and, above all, in the arms race.
But the sense of unease and fear soon subsided.
And the greatest conviction was precisely given by what was happening there in Berlin.
The Germans were, en masse, abandoning real socialism, choosing to leave everything to live in a capitalist society.
America was the future and Europe had no choice but to follow it, at a safe distance that is.
At the same time, a similar scene was taking place in the Tanjevic house, just over a kilometer and a half away as the crow flies.
There too were two adults and two children, a boy and a girl.
The habits of serving early supper were the same.
The dishes cooked very similar.
The speeches as well.
In that house, they talked about Uma and Mikhail's studies, about what had happened that day and never about the affairs of Slobodan, an administrative employee at the Ministry of Culture.
In both homes, wives did not discuss politics with their husbands, and mothers knew more about their children than fathers.
An opposite similitude, a dichotomy between thoughts and actions.
No one could have distinguished the two families from analyzing their home and their habits, while there was total incommunicability between their respective ideologies and thoughts.
Both heads of families, Dario and Slobodan, thought they embodied the perfect bourgeois-capitalist or proletarian-communist, but their families lived almost the same way.
Apart from that, an outside observer would have said that the contingent situations were completely identical, two almost parallel stories in different worlds separated by very few blocks.
Uma had often thought about this paradox.
She hadn't spelled it out yet and discussed it with Klaus.
Deep down she knew that their love could easily surpass the fences artfully constructed by the human mind and, in fact, so ephemeral.
The two of them belonged to a new generation, with no ties to a cumbersome and, at times, painful past.
Their love was the bridge that would break the dualism, a love so universal that it went beyond the titanic clash of the two economic and social systems that were challenging each other in Berlin.
She was sure of it two weeks later.
“Happy anniversary, love...”
It was early summer 1961. Klaus and Uma were exchanging small presents to commemorate the first year of their acquaintance.
Klaus placed a miniature model of the Eiffel Tower in a small box.
It was the monument that most attracted Uma, for its history and its steel features. A temporary construction that later became the symbol of an entire city.
He knew that his beloved wanted to see Paris and had imagined their honeymoon in that very metropolis.
Uma instead had opted for the Elvis record " His hand in mine ".
It was an appropriate title, it described very well how she felt about Klaus and which she knew was reciprocated.
Both agreed that their attendance should be made official.
“I'm tired of being controlled. My mother, for me, already knows...”
Even Uma was convinced that her mother knew.
She didn't know the boy's identity, but a woman realizes when her daughter has found love.
Similarly, a mother understands when her child changes irreversibly and that change is given by the first love experience.
A few days later, on one of his usual walks towards Pankow, after taking a tram to get closer to the area, Klaus had to introduce another unexpected extension to that announcement which was considered imminent.
“In the first two weeks of July, we will go out of Berlin.
When we come back, it will be time."
Klaus was sure of it this time.
Although considered "Western" and "capitalist" they could have moved within the DDR to reach Lübeck, located just outside the border and part of Federal Germany.
For two weeks, they would not see each other. The days would have been long to go by without that normal afternoon appointment.
The worst situation was that of Uma. She would have stayed in Berlin, in a house that was now too narrow and cramped for her and in a city where, setting foot outside the house, every corner would have reminded her of Klaus.
"Come on, two weeks go by quickly" Klaus consoled her, not even too convinced of those words.
The day before departure was very touching for both of us.
It was the first time, in over a year, that they would have separated and could not have said the classic "see you tomorrow".
They parted with a passionate kiss.
It was the first time they both had a start to think they hadn't made love yet.
There were no places for them to have more privacy. No one had such trusted friends or girlfriends who had a house, or a room, available.
Both families did not own any country or holiday residences.
For this reason they wanted to make everything official. Afterward, it would be much easier to be together, even in their own homes. And in those closed places, which they knew very well, the time would come when they would be alone, away from everyone's eyes.
Just the two of them and the whole world outside.
They had to postpone the amorous resolutions.
Klaus found Lübeck to be a fascinating city.
There was an air of freedom, and not only because they had definitively crossed over to the West.
That place was affected by its history, a kind of free and independent city-state.
There was much of the capitalist spirit, even before it was pitted against the proletariat and socialism.
Why hadn't his parents moved there?
They would have been happier and richer as well. And maybe in Lübeck it would have been possible, more easily, to start a business that Klaus thought he was suited for.
"But if they had, I would never have known Uma", so he reflected and deep down he was grateful for their choice.
He could not have conceived of a life without Uma.
Klaus spent more time with his family, thus being able to deepen his analysis of the ideas of his mother and father.
It was strange to think that in eighteen years of presence he had not yet fully understood certain aspects, but his ability to understand the small nuances had increased over the years and only in the last period had he acquired the full awareness typical of the beginning of the 'adulthood.
His mother was mostly interested in economic matters, while his father seemed to have more ideals.
He had repeatedly heard him praise Kennedy for the firm action after the meeting with Khrushchev, although she expected something more incisive.
Were it up to Dario, the Americans would have had to continue the war to defeat the Russians.
As long as there was even one communist country, no peace should ever have been made.
Klaus never answered, but wanted to point out that war was no longer possible with the nuclear weapons possessed by the two superpowers.
Uma, on the other hand, decided to stay at home, moreover spending time with her mother and brother.
Her mother seemed very strange to her.
She was a beautiful woman, endowed with considerable charm and proverbial mastery in the kitchen.
Yet, in the family she expressed little.
The father, on the other hand, showed no hesitation.
In his view, the capitalists should continue to be threatened.
He had never tolerated the surrender of three quarters of Berlin to the Allies.
“We got here, not them. The dead were ours,” he complained several times.
The little brother was for Uma a kind of refuge from his now almost adult age, although she preferred the time when Mikhail was less than six years old, with her posing as a mother in the absence of the real one and with the child extremely happy with the situation.
The two weeks served to make the wait even more agonizing.
On the return journey, crossing the border and riding in the back seat of the car, Klaus wanted to devour the asphalt.
He would have exchanged the vehicle for a racing car in order to speed up the arrival in Berlin and the meeting with Uma as much as possible.
Even the border controls seemed banal to him, obstacles placed between himself and the achievement of his objective.
When she saw her again, she looked even more beautiful.
How had he managed for two weeks in his absence?
Summer was in full swing. The sultry heat of Berlin oppressed the breath, very different from what was experienced in Lübeck, where the Baltic breeze adduced a constant refreshment.
They resumed seeing each other daily.
For a week, they only talked about what they had done in the days away.
The purpose of relating their respective families was again postponed or simply had been overtaken in priority by daily events and by how much the two lovers were fairy tales among themselves.
"The Berlin crisis has become a test of Western courage and will, and the security of the German city is essential to the security of the entire free world."
Those were the words Dario wanted to hear.
With that proclamation to the nation, Kennedy assumed a great responsibility.
He would not back down in defending Berlin against Soviet ultimatums.
The situation on the streets was tense.
No one noticed, except the two lovers.
Not their younger brothers and sisters, too young to fully understand the consequences.
Not their mothers, enclosed in their homes and their businesses.
Not their fathers, blind to their ideology and locked up in offices.
Only Klaus and Uma knew the streets of Berlin.
The people you could meet, the mood of the townspeople and shopkeepers.
Traffic and sidewalks.
Public transport.
Especially the squares and streets.
And everything showed them that the tension was rising.
That the proclamations of Kennedy and Khrushchev did not remain dead letters, empty words broadcast by means of television waves.
Every single syllable had descended on Berlin, leaving everyone waiting.
Waiting for an event, as it had been years before with the blockade and subsequent airlift.
An event, however, that no one knew how to hypothesize.
The start of a new war?
Or would it all end in a soap bubble? A political game on the skin of millions of suspended and anxious human lives?
The only certainty in that glittering world was given by Klaus and Uma's feelings for each other.
There would have been no obstacle to the fulfillment of their love.
So they spent the last days of July with such certainty.
Schools had ended and now they had more time to devote to each other.
It was easier to divert attention from the schedules.
“By the end of the summer, we'll make it all clear. In the face of our love, no one will be able to object” they promised each other during their meetings.
From then on, every day would be good.
Ulbricht's departure for Moscow in early August surprised no one.
It was known that a solution would only come from the Soviet Union.
Slobodan had noticed a change of attitude at the Ministry after the meeting between the two presidents in early June.
That change of attitude was taking shape more and more, like a Rossini crescendo.
The Ministry of Culture no longer obstructed the flight of Berlin citizens, and in general of the entire DDR, to the West, precisely by exploiting the ease of movement in the districts of Berlin which had been under Allied control and which now belonged to the Republic Federal.
Up until 1960, this information was considered confidential, and anyone who leaked it would be seen as a defeatist or, worse, pro-Western.
Now however, everything was said openly and not only within the Ministry.
Now the DDR wanted everyone to know that exodus of biblical dimensions.
We wanted to highlight the perfidy of capitalism.
Ulbricht himself had spoken of a manhunt and shameful human trafficking by the West which, in doing so, hoped to undermine the social stability of the DDR.
Posters and an intense press campaign had been prepared.
"Can they be that stupid?" Slobodan wondered.
“Is it possible that Westerners do not understand that the majority of people adhere to socialist ideals and will never leave, because this is the best possible country?”
He didn't mention these considerations in the family, at least not openly and not in front of his children.
Every now and then he talked about it with his wife Helena, who, while noting the great flight between acquaintances and neighbors, had never posed any doubts of this kind.
They had decided to live in the DDR and nothing was going to change this resolution.
His children were totally unaware of all this.
Mikhail was too young to understand and also at school there was a sort of state-driven information. The new citizens of the DDR would have arisen from the school benches; for which teachers and professors had the task of educating young people to the values of socialism.
Indeed, the professional world was shaken by this exodus. It was mainly professors, doctors, lawyers, notaries and craftsmen who moved to the West.
This really worried the Party.
Despite the proclamations of a classless society, there was a professional petty and middle class in the DDR that was literally flying off to the West.
And who would replace these professionals? The proletarians? Was it necessary to wait for the schools to churn out the new professionals, educated in the values of socialism? In that expectation, however, there would have been considerable economic and social problems.
Even at Mikhail's school, a couple of teachers had gone West with their families.
Uma, who would have been old enough to understand, wasn't damned about the contingent situation.
Politics wasn't of her interest and they certainly talked about something else with Klaus.
There were never any discussions between the two lovers regarding current events or the possible transfer of Uma's family to the West.
On the other hand, the girl was aware of her parents' ideas. She knew they wanted to continue residing on Schonauser Allee because they shared those ideals.
An escape from her family had never been considered. It wasn't in the girl's strings, the thought never touched any part of her brain, not even the most hidden ones.
Of all the Tanjevic family, only Slobodan had a fairly accurate picture of what was happening and possible solutions.
In his view, West Berlin should never have existed.
The Soviets should not have agreed to partition the city. From that gesture, all the subsequent problems had arisen and the 1961 crisis was none other than the direct consequence of the initial error.
It was said that, perhaps, a force plan could still be implemented to annex the western part of the capital to the rest of the DDR.
They were just a few square kilometers after all, nothing compared to the territorial gains and large spaces of the Second World War.
He had never stopped to think about the diversity of the geopolitical and military situation.
He could not understand the new power due to nuclear weapons and the consequent catastrophe that would have ensued.
He remained with the concepts of aerial bombardment, use of tanks and machine guns.
At the Novak house, in exactly the same way, the only person really interested in the story was Dario, the head of the family.
For him there was no doubt that the DDR was a cancer to be eradicated and that they, the inhabitants of West Berlin, were the vanguard of those who were supposed to annihilate the enemy.
He was willing to forgive fugitives, those who sought solace from the miseries of socialism by embracing Western values of freedom, happiness and well-being.
Somehow, these people had repented and redeemed.
Instead he couldn't stand all those who persisted in staying in the East.
He hated them. In his heart, he could have killed them, in other circumstances of course.
He had never really taken off the uniform of the Croatian militia who had sided with the Reich.
He had made those times fall into oblivion, but he didn't deny them and he didn't feel any different.
With a rifle, an assault department at his command and with the patrol of the territory, it would have been easy to cleanse the neighborhoods of East Berlin, from the "Bolshevik scum" as he used to say in his youth.
His wife Paula shared the same views, but was better at hiding her emotions and keeping her thoughts hidden.
She had to be even more cautious than her husband as thorough investigations had taken place in circles once familiar to her. She had come out totally extraneous, no one had ever questioned her and, precisely for this reason, she knew she had to keep a low profile and not attract attention, turning off her brain in the presence of strangers.
In any case, neither of them had ever said any of this in front of their children.
Only Klaus could have understood, given his age.
But the boy had other things on his mind.
Yes, of course, the numbers and the economy, for which he seemed suited.
According to his father he could have gone to university to become an economist, but also open a business. He saw in his son a kind of pioneering spirit suitable for capitalism, just what he lacked.
Especially Klaus had been constantly turned to love for Uma for more than a year now.
He wanted to live every moment of their relationship, because he now considered it as such.
He was projected into the present, to derive a living dream of the ecstasy in which he participated.
He also wondered about the future, but not beyond what he could glimpse with Uma.
His future was bounded within their relationship as a couple, what they would do together, their family and their children.
He had never thought of discussing with his beloved about the possible evolutions of what was happening in Berlin, even though they saw some changes in the attitude and surrounding environment every day.
When they were together, wandering through the streets and squares of their city, they were too engrossed in each other to receive those signals.
Ulbricht returned from Moscow but nothing was heard.
Not even the Ministries leaked a word.
Meanwhile, Westerners had gathered in Paris.
France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany sought a common line to deal with any Soviet response.
Answer that remained a mystery.
Nobody really knew what Khrushchev and the establishment of the DDR had in mind.
"You will see that as usual nothing will happen..." Slobodan had let slip at dinner.
Uma stopped the soup spoon halfway between the plate and her mouth.
“What should have happened?” she asked herself.
Subsequently, in order not to arouse suspicions, she resumed her dinner.
She was supposed to talk to Klaus about it the following day.
Her father was visibly annoyed. He couldn't sit still and was squirming.
Almost simultaneously, at the Novak home, Dario let slip a comment as the television reported the conclusion of the summit in Paris:
“But what are they waiting for? Do they think they are negotiating?”
Klaus didn't understand.
Of all he had heard he had only been attracted by the name of the city and from that moment on, he had begun to fantasize about his honeymoon with Uma.
The following day, August 10, an incumbency prevented Uma from being present at the appointment.
They had agreed on the following rule.
If Uma was more than fifteen minutes late or if Klaus was more than half an hour late, the appointment would be missed.
It had happened a few times, but this rule had made it possible to avoid dangerous internal disputes and useless discussions.
It was excluded that the telephone could be used to communicate.
Both knew how the monopoly of that object was in the hands of their respective mothers.
A female or male voice unrelated to school environments would have alarmed their parents beyond measure.
They had never wondered about the nonsense of such dictates after almost a year, especially if, in a few days, they would have to make their relationship official.
If you have to introduce your boyfriend or girlfriend at home, are you afraid to use the telephone?
And if they had been discovered, what would have been known to all would have been brought forward only a few weeks later.
However, the two lovers hadn't thought about these conjectures and how they could easily have avoided such complications.
They reveled a little in their clandestinity. Their relationship was solely their exclusive property. Nobody knew and this made them proud and proud, like when you were part of a secret gang as a kid.
They saw each other on Friday 11 August and the absence of the day before was soon forgotten.
Uma voiced the doubt to Klaus.
What had her father meant with that sentence?
The boy shrugged.
He really didn't know.
Of only one thing he was sure: he didn't want to wait any longer.
“Tomorrow we will introduce ourselves to the families!”
Uma's eyes widened in delight.
Had the fateful day finally arrived?
What would have been better to do?
They agreed that it would be best to talk to Uma's family first.
It was the most difficult obstacle, because after all it was the man who went to ask permission from the woman's family.
A patriarchal legacy, but one that reflected the approach of both families.
Only after that endorsement would they head to Klaus' house.
In order to make the communications effective and definitive, no detail should be overlooked, the most important of which was certainly the presence of the fathers.
Only with the certainty of Slobodan's and Dario's participation in their respective homes would they definitively end the period of secrecy.
Above all, with their approval, or at least a simple non-denial was enough, their union would have had no obstacles.
They studied how to approach speeches.
Everything relating to the political and ideological part should certainly have been left out.
First, because young people weren't involved in it.
Neither of them really cared what was happening.
Secondly, there were possible frictions there.
How would Slobodan have reacted knowing that his future son-in-law was of Croatian origin, living in the western part and with a strongly Western and capitalist family?
In the same way, how would Dario have considered the future wife of his son and mother of his grandchildren being the same one of Serbian origin and with a family aligned with and for the DDR and its values?
They should have talked about only one thing.
Of their love. It was what united them inextricably.
Those were hectic hours.
Coming home, they would have a hard time holding back that joy.
Klaus wanted to lift his sister Helga and make her fly, the same way he did when she was a child.
Uma wanted to hug her mother and tell her everything.
Ask her if she too had experienced similar feelings and sensations in the past.
They had a hard time falling asleep.
Only the deep darkness of the night, which lasted a few hours in summer, overcame them.
Upon awakening, they both felt full of vitality.
That Saturday morning would slip away into the spasmodic anticipation of early afternoon.
After the usual appointment at "their place", they would have walked for about a kilometer to head to Uma's house.
From then on, their fate would change irrevocably.
Klaus wasn't late that day.
He arrived on time, as he had rarely done before.
Uma looked sad.
Something must have happened.
“My father isn't here today, he had to go to the Ministry. It's a strange thing, but they called him into service today. They all called, so says mom."
She was embarrassed and wanted to justify herself.
Klaus took her hand and reassured her.
Nothing bad would have happened in putting it off one day.
"Let's do tomorrow, it's Sunday and nobody works on Sunday".
Uma was annoyed, despite logic saying that, after waiting for over a year, one day made no difference.
She had the attitude of someone who already sees the goal and later discovers that she still has one last effort to make.
They decided to head towards Alexander Platz and continue on to the Mitte district .
They would be as close to Uma's home as possible.
The two lovers, taken by their inner whirlwind, did not notice the strange sensation that pervaded the streets.
It was Saturday and everything seemed normal at first glance.
But if someone had only wanted to scratch the patina of the image, they would have discovered a very different world.
Slobodan, in the confines of his office at the Ministry, had glimpsed some dispatches and some posters.
Was this a real action or the usual proclamations?
He wasn't sure.
In any case, he didn't ask too many questions. Only Time would have solved the mystery.
The boys left shortly before dinner to head back to their homes.
"See you tomorrow honey".
This was their usual farewell.
Tomorrow, Sunday August 13, 1961, would be their big day.
They would reveal their love to the world.
No one was going to stop them.
No one could have put obstacles of any sort between them.
Exhausted by the tension of that day, they dozed off shortly after 10pm.
At the same time, in an anonymous country residence near Dollnsee, Ulbricht gathered the top leaders of the DDR, from the Politburo to the Government.
"Everything has been decided, unanimously".
Destiny had thrown its dice on the great gaming table represented by humanity.
II
II
Europe, 1944 - 1945
––––––––
“Warsaw has arisen. I don't think the Poles will be able to prevail, unless the Red Army intervenes, whose vanguards are stationed on the right bank of the Vistula.
It all depends on whether or not that city falls, maybe it's just a matter of time.
Sooner or later the Russians will take it”.
Dario Novak placed his rifle on the ground as, crossing the threshold of the house, he was preparing to report to his wife Paula, no longer on active service at the Wehrmacht detachment in Zagreb since their son Klaus was born about a year earlier .
The house was a cramped apartment which had the only advantage of being located in the city center.
Since the outbreak of the Second World War, Dario had abandoned Sotin , his home village on the left bank of the Danube, with the river acting as a border towards neighboring Serbia, to enlist in the Croatian militia and had never returned.
He knew nothing about his parents, brothers and relatives.
He had never wanted to know anything about it and the war was an excellent viaticum to cut all bridges with respect to a past that was always badly tolerated.
He had always been convinced of the superiority of the Third Reich and its armies, but last year's events were taking a turn for the worse.
After having conquered all of Europe, having reached the heart of Russia and a stone's throw from Egypt, it was now certain that the Axis forces were clearly retreating.
He let none of this slip by the military command.
He knew that, for much less, one could face the firing squad for treason or sedition or defeatism.
With Paula, however, he had no secret since their future depended on it.
Had Warsaw fallen, there would have been only five hundred kilometers between those "Bolshevik pigs" and the capital of the Reich.
From Dario's words it seemed that the problem was not if Warsaw had fallen, but when .
His wife looked at him questioningly.
From her point of view, it was all so absurd. It seemed like yesterday that Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow were under siege and now it was time to retreat and defend.
She had never disobeyed an order, as a perfect German educated in the Bavarian petty bourgeoisie.
At eighteen, she had decided what to do with her life: nurse.
At first she followed a basic course and, later, she practiced in the hospital in Munich to gain experience.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, she was transferred to the neighboring region of Baden-Wurttemberg, specifically to Grafeneck Castle.
In that place, she assisted the doctors dedicated to the purification of the Aryan race in the program called “Aktion-T4”.
It seemed to her that she was doing the Reich a great service.
She was putting into practice what was most noble and pure in the ideals of Nazism, namely the creation of a society of people free from all disease and contamination.
Her experience gained in that place allowed her to receive the definitive promotion from nurse assistant to nurse and to be deployed in the army, to better serve the Reich in the conquered territories.
Now it was necessary to apply the techniques and the method learned throughout Europe, purifying it from evil influences, in the first place from that of the Jews.
For Paula, the Jews were the worst possible evil.
She had grown up with such ideas both in her family and at school. She did not know Jews personally and was proud of it.
Arriving in Zagreb, she didn't take long to settle in.
In general, the Croatians had been very friendly and very sympathetic to the ideals of the Reich.
It was easy for her to give indications to the doctors of how cases of deviation should be treated.
Thanks to that job, she met her future husband.
Dario Novak knew the Croatian territory around Zagreb, where there were tiny villages that did not exist on geographical and road maps.
It would have been impossible for the Wehrmacht, even for the SS, to clean up Europe so thoroughly without the collaboration of local militias who knew how to move, how to talk, what to say and what not to say.
Whole villages were rounded up and the Reich was grateful to the allies.
The booty deriving from the looting of the houses was equally divided.
There was room for everyone, everyone would have their small, or large, reward.
On the other hand, the high officials of the Reich were not interested in trifles of little importance.
They moved mostly through noble estates, large country estates or precious city apartments containing works of art of all kinds, reserves of wines and spirits, tapestries, carpets, silverware, jewels and cash.
The militia were left with the small knick-knacks present in the house of the petty bourgeoisie, craftsman or farmer's tools and food which, in times of war, is never enough and which, in any case, could be bartered on the black market in exchange for clothes, weapons and ammunition.
So Dario had carved out his own world of trade and business, especially in the first period following the conquest of the Reich.
During the course of 1944, such raids had already been scarce for a year.
The last big cleanup was done in the early autumn of 1943 with the total evacuation of Jews and dissidents.
"Those Jewish pigs, they have been draining our blood for centuries", so he had rejoiced with Paula when the last truck had emptied the central command of prisoners, destined for various places in the Reich, but in any case far from their sight and their life.
Paula had been promoted to head nurse thanks to the valuable advice given to doctors.
Before she became pregnant with Klaus, she had been selected to train a new group of nurses who were to take part in the medical supervision of the labor camps.
A peculiar and meticulous training was carried out, partly in Zagreb and partly directly in the field.
And so Paula was transferred, for a few months, to Ebensee , in Austria.
She didn't like being separated from Dario at all, but even less would she have disobeyed an order.
It was an honor for her to see those techniques put into practice in such large numbers.
No longer just deviants and men considered inferior, lives unworthy to live, but all enemies of the Reich were to be treated.
Jews first, then gypsies, Roma, homosexuals, communists and socialists, Eastern Slavs of Russian, Polish and Serbian lineage.
The Reich of Aryans alone would rule the world.
Her eyes shone with a magnetic light when, returning from Ebensee , he described all the practices to Dario, from sterilization to medical experiments.
“I was told that we are preparing a safe method of mass extermination. A gas that costs little and which eliminates many people in a short time. Our dream is about to come true. We will rule the world and our progeny will see the great victory.”
At the time Dario was still convinced that the Reich would triumph and, precisely for this reason, he decided to give offspring to his own blood.
After a year and a half, everything had changed.
He knew now that they weren't going to win, but that they would have to try to survive.
“We have to get out of here, otherwise we will remain trapped in the Judeo-Bolshevik grip of the Asian hordes,” he ruled after eating dinner.
Paula was hesitant.
For her, that tiny house in Zagreb represented safety. Klaus was born and raised there and was now starting to walk.
Embarking on a journey in such conditions did not seem suitable to her. And to where?
Germany was subjected to continuous bombing, while here in Zagreb they could live almost normally.
On the other hand, she was aware of the dangers outside this house.
Her husband's activity was known and what was now considered a virtue and a source of pride would have become a shame and a condemnation if the partisans had won, perhaps aided by the advance of the Red Army.
She knew that such people would have no regard for her or her son.
She imagined all sorts of atrocities.
The step would be up to her.
It was Paula who could decide the fate of the family.
Only with her transfer request, it would have been possible to leave Zagreb.
She could have done it within a month, given that, after maternity leave, she had never returned to work.
Her duties were no longer in demand, or at least everyone had done without her for over a year and had to find a replacement.
She would present herself to the military command, moreover she always depended on that hierarchy, and she would ask to better serve the Reich, giving her willingness to return to service, but in Germany.
She quickly found a flaw in the reasoning.
There was no real plausible excuse that could convince the superiors.
To say “in Germany” would have been too generic. She would have given the air of wanting to flee or to leave that place.
She talked about it with her husband.
It was excluded to move to Monaco to get closer to her family.
Paula had made the same detachment from her relatives. Since she was moved to Grafeneck, she never wrote or contacted any member of her family again.
Everyone could have known it with a few days of investigation, as the correspondence was registered by the competent offices and therefore one could not lie in that way.
A number of cities were excluded because they were considered not beautiful or unhealthy or too close to the French or Polish border.
It was her husband who had the right idea.
“Let's move to Berlin...”
Paula had never seen the capital although she had always been drawn to that center of power.
Berlin would have been the ideal solution.
There were the main military and medical commands.
There was the Reich Chancellery there.
With the experience gained in the field, the transfer would be equivalent to a sort of promotion.
She was deeply convinced of this, so much so that she went to her superiors the following day.
The request was effective.
They forwarded a formal request and, after about a month, the long-awaited answer arrived.
The transfer would have taken place from the beginning of October.
In a completely natural way, the move of the whole family was arranged.
Dario would have given up his military and militia role and, knowing German, could access office or manual labor jobs.
It remained to define the final destination.
When they heard it, they laughed with joy and were pleased.
Paula had been destined for nothing less than the medical department dedicated to the main bunker of the entire Third Reich, the one that was supposed to house the entire Nazi command in Berlin, right next to the Chancellery.
They would have known all the high officials, perhaps Hitler himself.
The Zagreb command took care to report that they would receive temporary accommodation inside the bunker, pending finding a permanent accommodation.
In there they would be safe from the bombing and the cold of the soon to come winter.
They were certainly privileged.
Furthermore, Dario had been assigned secretarial duties at the radio station.
Klaus would have been safe inside the bunker and would have had no problems with food and water shortages.
On 5 October they reached their destination, after having crammed their clothes and a few furnishings into two suitcases and having faced a journey by train made up of four distinct stages.
They were all shocked, but the happiness in admiring the city was overwhelming.
Berlin was wounded by bombing, many neighborhoods were already in ruins, but its beauty and purity stood out at a glance.
They entered that tunnel that would lead them to their temporary home with the same joy of a child in front of a playground.
The Red Army advanced throughout the following winter and, in the spring, took up positions on the Oder line.
“Bloody bastards...”
Lately Dario was swearing more and more.
Air raids were increasingly frequent and heavy.
By now the small walks out of the bunker and in the central part of Berlin were just a memory.
We risked too much. Death could come at any moment.
From the Oder, the Russians could have also unleashed heavy long-range artillery.
In the west, the situation was no better.
The allies had forced the Rhine.
By now Germany was overrun by its enemies who, soon, would have the upper hand.
Up until that moment, Paula and her family had been safe and had not been harassed by the Russians or partisans.
The transfer to Berlin had been an optimal solution.
But now the battle seemed to be raging right on the capital.
It was clear that Stalin wanted the conquest of the city and the capture or death of all the leaders of the regime.
Paula was not resigned to that idea.
There were still so many soldiers willing to fight. It was impossible for Germany to have lost. In addition, there were the secret weapons that would change the course of the war.
The situation worsened considerably in April 1945.
The Russians had now surrounded Berlin and the light artillery began to do their job of painstaking and continuous destruction.
All this was of secondary importance.
It was the cheating that upset Paula.
First Goring, then Speer, finally Himmler.
The great hierarchs had turned their backs on the Fuhrer.
"I could understand the generals, but they didn't."
She fell into despair and cried for hours.
Dario, much more pragmatic and with a military vision that had already been clear for years, took matters into his own hands.
“They are evacuating the bunker, we have to go. A family with a child will go unnoticed. After all, we are civilians.”
They weren't going to take anything from that place. It was best to travel light.
Paula was no longer reactive so Dario filled a backpack with water and food, loaded it on his shoulders and put on a helmet.
He put his wife on a pair of comfortable shoes and placed Klaus in her arms.
They left their closet and joined the long line of people who were leaving.
Few remained behind them. Hitler and Eva Braun, the Goebbels family, some generals and some employees.
They moved at dusk.
Outside the bunker the air was mixed with dust, raised by the constant bombardments.
The hissing was constant and the earth shook with each blow.
Paula shook from the inside at each of those thuds and could have died of a broken heart if her husband hadn't been beside her.
Klaus, who was a calm child, started screaming after a while.
It was hell.
The Russians had turned Berlin into an indescribable bedlam.
They wandered almost at random in a ghostly and unrecognizable city. The streets and buildings no longer existed.
They camped in the "citadel", the part of the city center still in the hands of the SS.
The following day they would cross enemy lines and find themselves, for the first time, facing the enemy of all time: the Russian, the Bolshevik, the Communist, the friend of the Jews.
Darius hugged his wife and son to him.
The long overcoat served as a blanket that night.
He took water and food out of his backpack and everyone was fed.
Klaus finally went to sleep.
What would have been their end?
Would there have been a future for them in Germany and in the world, without the Reich and Nazism?
He sensed grave danger.
Someone would have investigated, someone would have asked questions.
Sooner or later someone would find them.
Some Serb, some partisan, some surviving Jew would have remembered him.
Some family member of some patient or even some of them would have recognized his wife.
Maybe some judge would even sift through the archives and documents, looking for evidence and names.
No one was going to forgive or save them.
At best, they would have been banished from society.
But they could have ended even worse. Shot or hanged, maybe Paula would have been raped or maybe they would have taken Klaus away.
They were secluded enough that they could talk to each other without being heard by anyone.
“Listen, Paula, we have to make a promise.”
His wife looked up and stared at him.
She did not understand what speech her husband wanted to make.
“We have to promise ourselves that none of us will ever say anything about what we did.
Never anything. Not a word to each other or to anyone else or to our son when he grows up.
You will say that you were a nurse in the hospital or in the service of the military. End.
I will be a militiaman who fought for his land and who followed you here.”
Paula was dumbfounded.
Should she erase her past?
Keep it to yourself and not be proud of it?
“But we didn't do anything wrong. It is they, the others, who should be ashamed if they made Germany lose!
I just followed orders and so did you.”
Didn't he really understand that woman?
Didn't he just realize that what was considered good until that day would be considered absolute evil from now on?
She explained it explicitly.
“So you want to tell me that it's not right to eliminate the Jews and the deviants? That it wasn't right to round up the partisans and the reds? What shouldn't those things be done?
Are you really the husband I married?”
Dario could not bear that affront.
Only Paula really knew him.
He took his wife's left arm and put it around his neck, then whispered in her ear:
“Those thoughts and things are right, my love. From tomorrow, however, they will no longer be, but not for us, but for the others who will populate this world. And in the others I also understand the cowardly traitors who will deny their past.
If we want to survive in tomorrow's world, we have to ignore it. Do not say anything. Keep quiet and keep a low profile. We will never put ourselves in the light, we will spend completely anonymous and ordinary lives. That's the only way we can save ourselves."
He saw two tears roll down Paula's face. One of them fell on Klaus who didn't notice anything.
They would have lied to everything and everyone.
They would have blended into the rabble they so despised.
They would have suffered the abuses of the democrats, the liberals, the Bolsheviks and the Jews.
The important thing was to live.
They sealed the deal with a kiss.
When they awoke in the first light of dawn, they headed resolutely towards the enemy lines, like a normal family.
After walking less than five hundred meters, they met the first Russians who ordered them to raise their hands.
They were searched. The soldiers found only water and food and no weapons, then they made big nods as if to say to get away from that place.
They resumed walking to put as much distance as possible from the front line.
The Russians smiled and rejoiced. For them, the war seemed already over.
Towards the afternoon, a radio communiqué was broadcast.
Hitler was dead.
The Reich was finished, soon Berlin, and then all of Germany, would surrender.
The Novak family was ready to face the future.
A future in which the last seven years were to be forgotten and erased forever.
At that moment, they stopped and dusted themselves off.
It was the signal that he would forget everything.
They saw a family similar to theirs. A man in civilian clothes and a woman with a daughter younger than Klaus.
Why did they go in the opposite direction? Why didn't they get away from that Bolshevik filth?
“Slobodan, don't stare at them...”, the woman turned to her husband, who was looking intently at a family that was striding away from them.
“They come from the center of Berlin, until recently they were protected by the SS, those bastards. No mercy for the collaborators of the Nazi regime.
Helena, you know what they did,” he answered his wife with a hard face.
Inwardly he thought of stopping them, asking for their personal details and questioning them, but his wife distracted him from that thought.
For Slobodan, the Germans, all of them, were to blame. Not only them clearly, also those who had backed them up, but every single German could not be said to be innocent.
They knew and pretended nothing happened.
Some, indeed many, were convinced of the unhealthy ideas of Nazism.
It wasn't just the soldiers who destroyed Plavna, his village in Serbia not even a kilometer from the right bank of the Danube, and forced them to flee.
That boy had anticipated his times, fully understanding how Germany's advance would be accompanied by ferocious massacres.
He had managed to escape a couple of days earlier from his village, located near the Croatian border, together with his wife Helena.
Only one direction: east. Where the hope resided.
At that time, the non-aggression pact between the Reich and the Soviet Union was still in force.
It meant being in hiding for a couple of weeks, just long enough to cross Romania.
Those were difficult times, in which the two went into hiding.
Once in Ukraine, they didn't stop, even though they were already on Soviet soil.
Slobodan knew that the Germans would not be satisfied with the pact and would attack their perennial enemy, Bolshevism.
Also, he didn't trust the Ukrainians. He had read about how they supported attempts at counter-revolution. He would have ended his continuous march only in the middle of Russia, the real one.
They settled in the countryside around Gorky, not without difficulty, but Slobodan had managed, thanks to his industrious communist activist, to make some powerful friends in the vicinity.
They did not see the massacres during the German aggression, but they understood the gravity of the situation and the imminent danger.
For two years they were afraid of the Germans and of the fact that communist ideals could definitively succumb, with no more possibility of return.
But Stalingrad changed everything.
It was the first real Soviet victory on the Eastern Front.
Surely the previous year, the Germans had been driven back from the outskirts of Moscow for a good three hundred kilometers, but there hadn't been a real pitched battle. The strength of the Wehrmacht remained almost intact.
Instead at Stalingrad an entire army was annihilated or taken prisoner. Large areas of reconquest opened up to the south.
First the entire Russian territory up to Kursk and, further south, up to the Black Sea.
Next, Ukraine and Belarus.
And finally the Balkan countries and Eastern Europe, the ideal gateway for entry into the Reich and its total destruction.
He talked about it with his wife.
He had been a good propagandist and a good Party informer, and that sort of peasant retreat did not suit his nature.
He still had the knowledge and esteem of the Party section chief in Gorky.
He would have talked to him to join the advance of the Red Army.
Helena accepted this decision, even though it meant separating from her husband.
In early April 1943, Slobodan joined the auxiliary rear, the part of the Army that was supposed to secure the reconquered territories by rebuilding a piece of annihilated civil society.
Tracing those responsible for the killings, documenting them, and putting power in the hands of trusted local comrades.
Above all, there was a need to track down those who, with a last-minute change of tunic, had been a Nazi collaborator until a few moments before and then passed themselves off as a victim or a convinced Bolshevik.
These people were the worst, according to Slobodan.
He had no human feeling of compassion for such people.
The separation between the two spouses did not last long.
Being in the rear and no longer having the Wehrmacht an offensive capacity beyond the front line, a woman could easily follow the Soviet advance.
He sent a letter to Helena telling her to leave everything, cramming only the essentials into a suitcase.
The woman followed the instructions and in early October 1943 they were physically close again.
Even later, when it was clear that Helena was pregnant, there weren't many problems.
They stayed a long time in Kursk, after the great tank battle that saw the triumph of the Red Army; therefore, they moved to Kiev and there their daughter was born, to whom they gave the name of Uma.
Slobodan shuttled around the whole of Ukraine to collect information about the roundups and harassment suffered by the civilian population.
He realized that the Cossacks, and the Ukrainian militia in general, had backed the Germans in the mass killings.
A large number of Jews had been shot on the spot, a much greater number had been taken westward towards Germany to so-called "work camps".
He was very impressed by the testimonies and how the population tried in every way to hide the facts.
It was as if everyone wanted to forget the age-old Jewish presence in Europe.
At the beginning of 1945, the entire Tanjevic family, with Uma who was only a few months old, was displaced in the eastern part of Poland to later move to Warsaw.
That city had become ghostly.
There was no intact building.
The war, but above all the German flamethrowers, had incinerated her.
The ghetto revolt and the Polish insurrection, two events that took place a year and a half apart, had unleashed the retaliation of the Nazis who, not only had proceeded with rampant summary executions, but had concentrated on urban planning, literally erasing it.
In Poland, Slobodan had become aware of the extent of the German massacre.
He had visited the labor camps, which were nothing more than extermination camps.
He had found human skeletons shuffling like flotsam, mass graves, thousands of the dead piled up, and chilling tales.
The smell was most pungent and unbearable.
A smell of death and misery.
For weeks he did not sleep.
He didn't say anything to Helena, but the woman noticed.
From that moment on, her husband began to harbor an ancestral hatred of the Germans.
In investigations, reports and interrogations, he treated them with contempt and insulted them constantly.
In Slobodan's mind, the only Germans worth living were those who had fiercely opposed Nazism.
Germans interned in those camps or exiles or the few who had resisted the war and propaganda machine of the Reich.
All the rest, they had to perish.
To be hanged or judged by courts and to rot in jail.
Some of his military superiors shared those views.
One of the first actions when conquering a territory was to hang SS or Gestapo officers, at least those who hadn't managed to escape or hadn't had the courage or time to commit suicide.
Others instead adopted a softer line.
They were the so-called "politicians", a derogatory term with which Slobodan pointed to them in his head.
They thought that an entire people could be redeemed.
To make the Germans, or some Germans, a model of socialism.
How deluded!
Helena knew a way to get her husband out of those thoughts.
It was Uma.
That five-month-old baby was the only being on the face of the earth to make Slobodan forget such ugliness.
As soon as she returned home to one of the temporary lodgings requisitioned by the Red Army, Helena took the baby out of her cradle and placed her in her father's arms, to the extreme satisfaction of the little one who laughed and seemed to appreciate it.
That smile, still toothless in sight, opened his father's heart, who was taking a break from everything that had happened during the day.
In those moments, Slobodan was actually an affable and kind person, without the streak of resentment and grumpiness that comes from having seen the consequences of all sorts of crimes.
There was no certainty in their future.
They didn't have a proper home.
Since they had left Serbia, they had done nothing but flee or reside for a short time in many places.
About three years in Gorky, then seven months in Kursk and the same in Kiev, then a few weeks around Poland and finally the last two months in Warsaw.
Where would they go after the war?
Helena knew she should have told her husband about it.
That evening, in mid-March 1945, with a fairly severe cold for the season, he gathered courage and broached the subject.
She explained her reasons and above all that of the child who, not being able to express herself yet, needed someone to take care of her needs.
“Where are we going to live? We need a safe and secure abode."
There were other pressing questions in the woman's head.
What will we do after the war?
Slobodan hadn't thought of that yet.
He was too busy with his work, considering it a sort of mission.
Clean the world of Nazis.
He shook his head and tried to turn away.
But Helena was very determined.
She wanted answers.
Somehow she demanded them, she felt she deserved them.
She had followed her husband around Europe without saying a word.
Surely she was grateful to him because, thanks to his intuition, they had managed to escape massacres and violence, but now the time had come for future decisions.
“Are you thinking of going back to Serbia? In our village or in Belgrade?”
Slobodan glared at her.
That decision was totally out of the question.
He would not set foot again in his native land.
Not after what she'd guessed would happen.
“Back for what? To see that they're all dead? Or that they forgot about us? And maybe have some neighbor who was the cause of our escape or the death of our loved ones?”
The tone was categorical and cutting.
Therefore, a return to what, up to that moment, Helena had considered as her home and place of origins was excluded.
She was afraid that her husband, once the war was over, would want to leave Gorky again. She didn't like that house and that place.
“I don't know, I like the job I'm doing. Maybe I could put myself at the service of some committee or body, in short, something that the comrades decide to set up after the war.
I know both Russian and German, it's not for everyone, right?”
Helena was relieved.
Such an answer put an end to the possibility of a return to peasant life near Gorky.
Slobodan would make himself available to what the Party would tell him to do.
This was the reality.
Party priorities came before family priorities.
She and Uma would have to adjust to the situation.
That was enough for that evening.
Before falling asleep, Helena daydreamed in her mind.
of Serbia and Gorkji, the entire Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe remained.
She didn't like the Balkan ones.
Budapest seemed like a beautiful city to her, and so did Prague.
The Red Army was entering these capitals.
Poland no, it was not to her liking.
There was misery, much pain and destruction.
The next day, Slobodan understood something fundamental.
The closer they got to the heart of the Reich, the more the investigations would be dense and the culprits multiple.
What had happened in the Ukraine was nothing compared to the massacres perpetrated in Poland and the number of people involved was much greater.
The Red Army was by now already in German territory, as were the Allies.
It would all be over soon.
Soon the Reich would fall and, with it, all its crimes which, however, were not to go unpunished.
Woe to you if you thought that, once the war was over, you could go back to your old life.
Time would play a key role.
The more time elapsed between the investigation and the gathering of evidence, the more there would be unpunished culprits and forgotten massacres.
We had to hurry.
Be first in line.
“I'm wasting my time here in Warsaw,” he thought to himself.
There were many other people working on these cases in Poland, while there were almost none in Germany.
He asked to confer with the Party contact person for military matters.
After two weeks, he was accepted.
He presented his idea.
A halo of smoke surrounded him.
The official was nervously devouring one cigarette after another.
“Mr. Tanjevic, do you realize what you are asking me?
You have a family, how can I send you to the front line?”
Slobodan thought about it for a moment.
He should have gone alone.
So it could be done, without objections of any kind.
He thus replied to the official who nodded in mock approval, then affixed a stamp.
"Request granted," he said, grinning mockingly.
Once Slobodan had left the room, he added to himself:
“Everyone who wants to be a hero. They think they can defeat the Reich by themselves... what idiots”.
But then he remembered the fact that such people were needed, for the socialist cause and for the final victory.
Helena was not very happy with the news.
"So you leave us alone in this city that we don't like?"
The woman had become demanding since their daughter was born, at least this was what her husband thought in the face of the constant protests and demands.
"But it's only for a few weeks," he tried to justify himself.
Not seeing her convinced, he added:
“If I realize that there is no danger, you could join me...”
The following day he set out and by evening was near the Oder.
He stayed there for a week to gather information and testimonies.
The number of German prisoners was considerable and various facts could be reconstructed.
The system of labor and extermination camps was widespread throughout the territories occupied by the Nazis, something capillary and maniacal.
Mountains of paper to nail those responsible.
And we didn't just talk about the SS, but also about soldiers, ordinary citizens, various professionals and officials.
A few days later he crossed the border and entered Germany.
He was on enemy soil and his contempt grew even more.
Berlin was now surrounded by siege and there would have been no possible counterattack.
He wrote to Helena that there was no danger and that she could leave with the baby. He calculated that between delivering the letter, preparing it and moving it, it would arrive in five days.
He didn't miscalculate.
The family was reunited again.
They followed the caravan of the Red Army.
Uma, now seven months old, hadn't gotten used to the noise of war. Cannons and artillery woke her often.
Neither parent thought it was an unsuitable environment for such a small creature.
It would all be over in a short time, a few weeks at the most.
When they glimpsed Berlin in the distance, they gasped.
It all started from there.
In that city there were the chiefs and the worst enemies.
Slobodan understood that his activity would reach its peak there.
In the few square kilometers of extension, the main perpetrators of all the massacres of recent years and the most trusted collaborators nestled.
No German from that city was innocent, they all had to be investigated, interrogated and judged.
The Red Army was entering the city from several points and by now the enemy was totally surrounded and defeated, only the final blow was missing.
Slobodan had no mercy on anyone, not even those Germans with no more food and ragged clothes.
He had seen much worse in the concentration camps.
Moreover, there were the victims and these were the executioners.
Entering the suburbs of the city on foot, he showered the Germans with insults, then stopped them at random to ask for their personal details and register them.
Almost every day, the Tanjevic family slept in a different place and Helena's worries increased.
This time she wanted a definitive answer from her husband, not something evasive.
“Still with these talks?” Slobodan was quite annoyed by the situation.
He didn't know what to answer, but his wife kept pressing him.
“We'll stay here in Berlin, if you like.
There is so much work for me to do here. I will investigate all the Berliners, file them all. Here the Red Army will stay in time and we will be protected.
We will teach these pigs socialism and execute the guilty ones.”
They were not words, but sentences.
By now the decision had been made in an irreversible and irrevocable way.
Berlin would be their new city, where Uma would grow up and they would grow old.
The capital of the enemy would have been the perfect location for the nemesis.
At that moment, Helena glimpsed a family completely identical to hers, with only two differences: a son older than Uma and the opposite direction of travel.
The family was moving away from the city center, while they were heading to the heart of the Reich to experience its defeat first-hand.
While her husband was speaking abusive words against them, Helena thought that, from the following day, such people would be their fellow citizens.
She took her husband's arm and pulled him towards her before Slobodan could approach them and begin her painstaking job of intelligence gathering.
The man was taken away from his thoughts and looked at Uma, who automatically smiled.
Helena seemed to notice that, in the same instant, the boy of that family smiled back at her daughter.
III
III
Berlin, autumn 1949
––––––––
"They just have to shut up, they can't object to anything", protested, puffing in mid-air, the clerk Slobodan Tanjevic, who had been part of the SED bureaucracy for a few months, the almost unique party which, in accordance with the Soviet style, had monopolized the Popular Congress, established only a few months earlier.
The denazification effort in the immediate postwar period had waned, mainly because the Soviet Union controlled only the eastern part of Germany, with the exception of half of the city of Berlin.
Slobodan viewed such concessions as a shame.
Not even a month after the end of the Reich, already a part of Berlin had to be surrendered.
It would not have been possible to eliminate all the Nazis and complete his mission.
Westerners had been too lenient, and although several trials had taken place, the majority of the population went unpunished.
A few thousand people had been tried against the millions who he believed were responsible for the crimes.
In addition, the Americans had used a large part of the German bureaucrats, totally compromised with the Nazi regime, to build an anti-Soviet backbone that had materialized over the past four years.
The blockade of Berlin, i.e. the Russian decision to isolate West Berlin by closing all access to the borders, had been of no use.
The Allies had organized an airlift that was continuing even after the lifting of the blockade, about a year after its introduction.
In addition, the West had blatantly violated the agreements.
France and the United Kingdom had soon withdrawn militarily and politically, leaving the field free for the Yankees, who
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 18.04.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-3928-8
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