Months passed, and years, and in spite of the escalating chaos of the world around him Teo’s cloistered life was constant and unchanging. He grew accustomed to bombs that fell nightly, as close as Charlottenburg, rattling dishes and glasses and occasionally knocking a painting to the floor. Sometimes he dreamt of, and even prayed for, a bomb in Grunewald, one that would blast away the tall gate holding him captive. He would run down Erbacherstrasse to the Grunewald train station, but there the dream always ended; he had no papers, no money, and he knew his freedom was not good for more than a few hundred meters.
With the decreasing variety and quantity of food, he had less to prepare and with Freddy’s more frequent absences, he had less housekeeping to account for. Freddy denied him access to the radio, he was forbidden contact with every human being and had to stay away from windows at all times. Sometimes, deep in the house where he could be certain no one would hear, he would put Lena Horne on the gramophone to recall what it was like to feel something, feel anything:
Alone from night to night, you’ll find me,
Too weak to break the chains that bind me,
I need no shades to remind me,
I’m just a prisoner of love.
For one command I stand in wait now,
From one who’s master of my fate now,
I can’t escape, it’s much too late now,
I’m just a prisoner of love.
He was to leave no trace of his presence at any time, lest an impromptu search be conducted. He returned books to their places on the shelf even if he was only walking down the hall to the kitchen for a few minutes. He shared a single toothbrush with Freddy, he dried droplets in the sink and hid the moistened hand towel from view. On one frightening occasion he had heard Freddy making a commotion at the front gate and looked out in time to see him entering noisily in the company of two uniformed officers. Freddy had fumbled long enough with the lock in the front door to enable Teo to shimmy into a tiny space behind the pantry, his appointed hiding place. The men stayed for an hour, in spite of Freddy’s mixture of reassurances and outraged ranting, finding not a single clue that Freddy lived anything but the life of a faithful husband forced away from his family and castle.
Teo began to fancy himself a ghost. Where once his physical presence, his dancer’s physique, had been the focus of his world, now he paid no attention to his body at all. His solid muscles slackened, his pliancy waned. He glided lightly from room to room, even dust lay undisturbed in his wake. He spoke rarely, either to himself or to Freddy, when he was around. He no longer fantasized or dreamed, elaborate plans to murder Freddy and escape the house in disguise drifted away like so much smoke. His expression carried the look of a man once stunned, now jaded.
For he was now, indeed, a man. He had passed eighteen, nineteen, twenty in this secluded villa in Berlin. Had Freddy not insisted, Teo would have let his hair grow long and unkempt, would not have bothered to shave the new whiskers that crowded his narrowing face. He was maturing, no longer the fawnlike boy who had come from Copenhagen to dance for the Führer. He was taller now, fully as tall as Freddy. Hair sprouted on his chest, but this, too, Freddy demanded he remove.
His twenty-first birthday passed but he could not recall ever having reached twenty. He barely remembered his family, now so many years distant though really, he hoped, still only a pleasant day’s drive over the wheat plains of northern Central Europe. The Sonnenfeld family had scattered from his mind like so much ash, though he could still picture Sofie’s tapered fingers. His own fingers twitched as he imagined lifting her in the air, her thighs soft and buttery, her skirt fluttering in his face.
Never, ever, did he revisit the Berlin Staatsoper or his dance these days. He would have been unmoved to know that the theater, only a few kilometers to the east of him, was now an annex of Nazi headquarters or that the stage on which he had danced the dance that had changed his life now held a printing press that printed many of the millions of flyers and manifestos that fluttered from German airplanes and rained down upon Paris, Prague, his own Warsaw. It wasn’t that he had forgotten, it was that for Teo that evening, that theater, that dance no longer existed. Their memory had been expunged. Where once he had dreamt of escape, had imagined daily the scaling of the gate of his prison, the cool unobtrusive walk through the streets of Berlin, the slow hay wagons that would convey him to Warsaw or Copenhagen, now his imagination prevented him even from passing through the locked front door of this villa.
On his twenty-second birthday, a cold gray morning in the month of February 1944, in a small window of time between massive British air raids and massive American air raids on Berlin, Teo prized open the French doors to the small verandah over the front entrance to the house. He could smell Freddy on him, smeared across his skin like an ointment. Teo had not recognized the date until Freddy presented him with a tiny packet of chocolates wrapped in green tissue paper and tied with a bow, all hard to come by in Berlin, and a risk: what would Oberstleutnant von Edelwald, whose wife was a world away in the mountains near Salzburg, need with a sentimental packet of sweets?
Teo held the packet of chocolates in his hand as he stepped onto the verandah in the cold daylight, dressed only in trousers and shirtsleeves. He unraveled the satin bow, let the tissue paper flutter in the wind, watched the leaf-green sheet lift high into the trees and catch on a thin twig. He lifted the lid of the box, selected a chocolate and sent it soaring over the gate into the street. Two boys running by noticed the chocolate as it landed, pounced to pick it up. “Idiot, you’ve smashed it,” said one to the other. Teo threw another, which hit one of the boys on the side of his head. He stooped to retrieve the chocolate. Both boys looked up at Teo standing on the verandah.
He stared down at them, wordless. He threw another chocolate, then another, and several more boys appeared. By the time two more chocolates rained down on them, general mayhem had broken out, five boys were swinging fists at one another. A whistle sounded from up the street and two Freikorps officers appeared. They pulled the boys apart. They asked no questions, but the evidence of Teo’s presence was long gone, the chocolates either consumed and digested or smashed into the sidewalk. The Freikorps men did not look up to discover Teo in his perch, but one of the boys peered at him over his shoulder as he was being dragged off.
Teo sat waiting all afternoon for a knock at his gate. He listened, that evening, for a pounding at the door. None came.
Freddy spoke rarely to Teo of the war; Teo was left to gather scattered crumbs of his conversation, collect hints dropped on the pillow as Freddy drifted off to troubled slumber. Sometimes he would tiptoe down the stairs once Freddy was sleeping soundly, on the off chance that Freddy had left a communiqué or even a newspaper on his desk. The war had been raging for so long that sometimes Teo could not remember what peacetime was like, what it meant to cross a street or sip hot chocolate in a café. It seemed as though the war would last forever.
In bed one late August morning that year, nearly five years to the day since Teo had arrived in Berlin, Freddy told him that the German army had been forced out of Paris by the English and the Americans. “It’s the beginning of the end,” he said. He told him how Rome was now in Allied hands, how the Russians were advancing from the east, how Hitler had nearly been killed in an assassination attempt just one month earlier. “That may have sped up the inevitable.” In a whisper he added, “It would have been a blessing. How could he think he could fight the whole world and carry out this ridiculous Final Solution at the same time? There simply aren’t enough resources for everything all at once.”
Teo turned on his side to face Freddy. “Final solution to what?” he asked.
Freddy tried to pull him in close, to gather him to his chest, but Teo resisted. “Final solution to what?” he asked again.
At first it seemed to Teo that Freddy was in pain; he had never seen his face contort in such a way. Then Freddy began to sob heavily, burying his face in Teo’s neck. He cried and cried, his heaving body disconsolate. Teo lay still until the sobbing ended and Freddy was breathing normally.
“Final solution to what?” he said quietly to the ceiling.
Freddy lifted himself on one elbow in order to look into his face. “Teo, my teddy, my lovely boy. Tell me just once you love me. Tell me that when this awful, awful war has ended you will forgive me, tell me you won’t leave me. I need you, Teo, I need you beside me. I can’t imagine …” He began to cry again, collapsing onto Teo. Teo let him spend his crying, then slipped out from under Freddy and away from him, as far away inside the house as he could possibly get.
After that, Teo was hungry for news and took every measure to wrest it away from Freddy. Once or twice he was raped for his efforts, but far more often he played on Freddy’s fatigue and his desperate obsession and was successful at trading secrets for sex. That was how in September he learned of the liberation of Brussels, in October the Allied occupation of Athens, in November, the sinking of the Tirpitz, Germany’s only surviving forty-two-thousand-ton battleship, which the Allies had been after continuously for eighteen months. He enjoyed this new power, felt good about being reciprocated for what he had been forced to give away for so long. He enjoyed, too, Freddy’s self-loathing at paying for favors and his constant, painful turmoil.
Less than two weeks into 1945, Freddy came home early, just after dark, ripping off his uniform on the stairs as he sped Teo up to the bedroom. “You’re mine tonight, my love. The Russians have captured Warsaw.”
Teo stopped. “Warszawa?” he asked in Polish.
“Yes, yes, your Warsaw,” Freddy said, now rapidly stripping to his underwear. “The Warsaw where you lost your first tooth and where you began to dance and where your body blossomed into ravishing adolescence.” They tussled briefly as Teo resisted, but Freddy was aflame, strong and alert as he had not been in months. He twisted Teo’s arm behind his back and pressed him roughly to the wall. “You wanted to play it this way, now pay up.”
Teo reached blindly behind him, grabbed Freddy’s flesh where he could and squeezed hard. “This may be your last chance,” Teo spat through clenched teeth.
Teo saw little of Freddy after that. With constant bombing in Berlin and frontline officers falling regularly and being replaced by others, Freddy was promoted to more serious intelligence work, rapidly rising from Oberstleutnant to Oberst, Generalmajor and finally Generalleutnant in the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence. He was meant to sleep at headquarters but would bribe the guards, taking advantage of the general chaos that was descending on them all, and straggle into bed next to Teo at two or three in the morning, only to leave again before dawn. He no longer begged for sex, he just lay next to Teo and held him, wrapped himself around and over the young man as if trying to absorb him into his every pore. Sometimes Teo would awaken to the light of a lantern and find Freddy staring at him, not touching him at all. Freddy’s eyes, full of tears, would plead with him then, but Teo would turn over and feign sleep. Once he heard Freddy singing, weakly, to himself: “Who’ll take my place in your heart when I’m gone? … There is no one who will love you like I do.” Teo no longer worried that Freddy might harm him.
In mid-April Freddy wandered in late one evening looking dazed. He’d attended a concert of the Berlin Philharmonic playing Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. At the exits, members of the Hitlerjugend had handed out free cyanide capsules. “It’s all so surreal,” he told Teo, incredulous. “The Russians are closing in on Berlin, but my job now is to organize a wonderful party for the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday.” He gazed at Teo wildly but did not seem to see him. “A party. With champagne and a cake. Hah! A celebration! And music! But who will play for us? All the best musicians were Jewish, but there are no Jews in Berlin anymore, no Jews in Germany.” Now he was looking at Teo, seeing him. “You, my friend, may be the last one for all we know. You’ve made it, you know, because I’ve kept you here safe with me. You can’t ever forget that.”
“I won’t,” said Teo coldly. “Ever.”
On the day following Hitler’s birthday, Berlin lost its gas and electricity. Freddy was only home for an hour or two each day. And then, on the night of April 25, Freddy did not come home at all. He flew into the house late the next morning, a warm and sunny Thursday, his shirttails loose and flapping from his trousers. “The Americans and the Russians have met, they’re one hundred twenty kilometers south of here, at Torgau.” He ran about the house collecting papers. “I’ll be back for you in a few hours, we’ll make a break for the north, try our chances outside Berlin. In the meantime, take as much of the art down to the room underneath the garden shed as you can. Just try to put the paintings on furniture, keep them off the ground.” He was out the door before Teo could respond, then a second later barged back in. “Keep the Degas dancing boy and the Vermeer up here, we’ll take them with us.” He tossed the keys to the shed to Teo and was gone.
Teo spent several hours hauling and arranging the works of art, and his shoulders were sore from the effort. He packed what few clothes he owned and set his suitcase beside the door, but years of keeping himself hidden took their toll and he stashed the suitcase in a closet. He could hear commotion in the street, and sometimes passersby would shake the sturdy iron garden gates, but mostly Teo sat immobile, staring at the small statue of a boy dancing.
Teo awoke in his chair in the middle of the night, the house completely dark. He lit a lantern and walked from room to room. There was no sign that Freddy had been there. The noise in the streets grew louder the next day, and still Freddy failed to return. By Sunday Teo knew Freddy would not be coming back. As the afternoon sun fell in the sky, Teo toured the perimeter of the house and scouted the garden shed for any implements that could help him. Back inside, waiting for dark, he collected portable valuables—Freddy’s monogrammed cuff links, a gold cigarette lighter, a fountain pen, and on an impulse, his Bournonville ballet slippers; he did not look for money or his real documents, knowing he would find neither—then as soon as the city had sunk into darkness he dragged a stepladder, several planks and a thick rope out to the tall chestnut tree at the front corner of the garden, nearest the gate, and set to work. From the top of the stepladder he threw the rope over the lowest, sturdiest branch he could reach, then descended and moved the ladder up close to the gate and positioned a plank where he would be able to reach it when he swung from the tree; the idea was to lay the plank over the spearlike tips of the garden gate that would otherwise impale him. Even with occasional pauses as military vehicles lumbered past, the whole operation did not take long to arrange thanks to the extinguished streetlamps, but the execution was considerably more difficult. Teo spent hours swinging on the rope. His hands were raw from the rough hemp, he smashed himself repeatedly into the gate and was bruised on the right and left, and several times, after successfully scaling the top, setting the plank in place and attempting to climb onto it, the plank slipped and he caught the tip of the spear. At one o’clock he went back into the house to rest, since his arms were shaking so that he could no longer hold the rope. He did not awaken until after dawn and was forced to postpone his escape until that evening.
He had experience this time and so, on his third attempt on the evening of April 30, 1945, at just an hour before midnight, Teo left the house in Grunewald for the last time. He had not seen life beyond the gates in nearly three years.
Berlin was not at all as he recalled. Peaceful and gracious avenues were now overrun with rubble and litter and people running this way and that. White-paint messages shouted from every wall: Every German will defend his capital! Victory or Siberia! Wir kapitulieren nie! Just two blocks from the house a man ran past him screaming, “Die Russen sind hier! Die Russen sind hier!” and then around a corner came a Russian tank, aimed straight at him. Teo signaled to the tank, hoping to stop it, but the tank nearly ran him down and Teo was forced to jump to the side of the avenue, where he fell on the curb.
Suddenly he was being dragged from behind. “You fool,” the voice behind him said, “what did you think you were doing?” Teo turned toward the middle-aged man who had just pulled him into a doorway. “That was a Russian tank, did you think he would stop to give you a ride? You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you or run you down! They’ve taken over the Reichstag, I saw the flag flying myself. The Reich is dead, some say Herr Hitler, too, long live the Führer! This is it, friend, our days of glory are over.”
Teo threw back his head and with a violent heave, spat into the man’s face. He dashed back into the street, running and running toward the center of the city, the rubble and madness increasing as he went. Traffic was streaming steadily in the opposite direction as German officers tried to flee and the conquering Russians tried to capture them, or chase them out, Teo was not sure which. There were no streetlights and movement was slow and dangerous.
Teo did not stop to ask himself where he was going; after hours of wandering, nearly run over on several occasions, after dodging stray bullets and falling repeatedly on bricks or bodies, he found himself at the entrance to the Tiergarten. Gone were the swans, gone were the animals in the zoo, gone were most of the trees; the park had been stripped for fuel, for food, for whatever besieged Berliners needed. Here, on a low, grassy slope, Teo finally fell to the ground and slept until morning.
Teo roamed Berlin for two days, starved and parched. Sometimes he hid in abandoned buildings that looked as though they might fall on top of him, sometimes he returned to one park or another. A bomb fell half a block from him once and set his ears ringing for hours.
On his third morning of wandering about Berlin, two Russian soldiers lifted him off the ground from a deep sleep in a small graveyard, just several hundred meters from the house that had been his prison and refuge for nearly six years. They brought him to an old stone church, one of the few buildings on the block left standing, and locked him up with twenty other men in a pen built for four or five. “Ich bin ein Jude,” he protested first in German, then in Polish, but the soldiers were unimpressed. His cellmates eyed him warily, and one elbowed him in the stomach.
The next day Teo and several of his cellmates were called on to testify before being shipped out to a POW camp near Oranienburg. Teo answered all questions, explained his precarious imprisonment in a posh suburban villa, but could sense that his interrogators did not believe his story. Worse, one of the burly Russians seemed as though he might like to take advantage of Teo much like Freddy had.
For nearly a fortnight Teo was treated as a German prisoner of war, incarcerated with other males who had not been at the front: the lame, the insane, the elderly, the boys.
Finally, on his third appearance before the prison administration, he had a reprieve; a Polish Jew had been employed to interrogate the Polish speakers.
“What is your name?” he asked in Polish.
“Teodor Levin, sir. From Warsaw.”
“I have heard this name before.”
“You have? I was once a dancer …”
“Yes, precisely, that’s it! I have a folder here somewhere,” he said. He left his desk for only a few moments before returning with a dossier that he began to leaf through.
Teo was elated to meet someone who, for the first time in years, knew who he really was.
The man looked from the dossier to Teo and back to the dossier. “You don’t look much like your photograph anymore,” he said at last. He took Teo’s chin in his hand, turned his head from side to side. “But your eyes match the description.” He released Teo’s face and shook his hand. “My name is Harry Cukier,” he said in Polish. “I’d like you to answer a few questions for me.”
In fact, it turned out that Cukier knew certain details of Teo’s story even better than Teo did. He told Teo that it was Freddy himself who had had him detained and then released to his custody, that Teo could have returned to Copenhagen even in the first few weeks after the outbreak of war, despite what Freddy had told him. He told Teo that members of the Resistance had stopped looking for him years earlier, since a young man traveling under his name, with his identification papers, had boarded a northbound train in January 1940 but was stopped at the Danish border and sent to Sachsenhausen and later Auschwitz, where he perished. “Your baron dispatched some unlucky young man to certain capture and death just to keep you hidden and for himself,” Cukier said, shaking his head. “But you are safe and in relatively good health, I see, so no matter what has happened to you, you are far luckier than most of our fellow Jews.”
Teo looked down at himself, his body violated but whole. In the weeks following his escape from Grunewald he had been hearing stories of the concentration camps, of torture and deprivation, of beatings and gassings, of mass extermination, the Final Solution Freddy had refused to explain. He had slept through the war on eiderdown in a villa filled with books. He had spent his days tracing the brush stroke of a Matisse or admiring the spectacular color of a Tahitian Gaugin. He closed his eyes tightly. “Do you have any word of my family?” he asked.
Cukier closed the dossier, sighed heavily. “Your parents and your Danish friends were frantic to find you, but Warsaw was under siege almost from the very day you arrived in Berlin. We lost contact with your parents shortly after they were moved into the Ghetto.”
Teo held his breath and Cukier continued. “Your father, Oskar, fell ill and passed away there. Your mother, Rosa Levin, was deported to Treblinka in August 1942. She did not survive. Your sister, Margot, however, was not with them, and there is fair reason to believe she was hidden and may be alive today.”
Teo’s head suddenly felt too heavy for his body. He folded his arms and laid it on top of them, barely breathing. Cukier placed a knobby hand awkwardly on his own. Teo was grateful for this fatherly human touch, but he could muster no emotion. He wanted nothing more than the black obliteration of deep sleep.
They sat this way for several minutes, until Cukier said, “You obviously do not belong in this prison. I’ll reassign you to the DP camp. The Sonnenfeld family were ferried to safety in Sweden several years ago, they’ll probably already be back in Copenhagen so you may wish to consider relocating there.” He stopped talking, and Teo lifted his head from the table. “I wouldn’t return to Warsaw if I were you. The city’s been razed, it’s hard to believe you’ll find anyone you know there. Besides, you left so many years ago …” Cukier could see that this was too overwhelming for Teo. “Anyway,” he continued, “you’ll have to think about all this. Try to remember that you’ve been very lucky, that you have a new start in life now. Try to return to the living.”
In July he returned to Copenhagen, calling himself Teo. The ballet master found him lodgings in an apartment building owned by the Royal Theater, just a small room under the eaves but a place for him to live free of charge. Teo tried working himself into shape, joined a few classes, but no longer possessed the stamina, the flexibility or the drive. Instead he was given a job working with the youngest dancers, and served as assistant rehearsal director and choreographer. Many of his classmates were now in the corps de ballet or even dancing as principals, including Niels. They were sympathetic toward him but kept their distance.
Two years passed thus. Teo’s world was almost as narrow as his life in Berlin had been. He rarely socialized, spent his days at the theater and his nights alone at home. On Friday evenings he would eat a festive Sabbath meal with the Sonnenfelds, then escape as early as possible to his tiny apartment. He declined invitations and eventually the world complied and left him alone.
But a letter he received in his second Danish winter would change all that:
2 February 1947
Dear Mr. Levin,
The Soviet sector of the Allied Control Council formally requests your participation at the trial of Friedrich Sebastien Amadeus von Edelwald, lieutenant-general in German Military Intelligence from 1939 to 1945. It is believed that your testimony is crucial in the pursuit of justice and we thereby request that you make every effort to be present. Your travel expenses and accommodations will be provided by the Council.
The trial is scheduled to open 17 April. Please make plans to be at the Allied Control Council headquarters in Berlin, at the address below, several days prior.
Respectfully,
Ivan Poliakov
Presiding Judge, Soviet Military Tribunal
Teo moved the letter around his apartment for several days, rereading it when he awoke each morning, when he returned from the ballet, before falling asleep. It brought him nightmares, and daymares too. One morning he put the letter in the rubbish bin but by that evening he had fished it out again.
On April 14 Teo packed a bag with his meager belongings. In an inner pocket of his overcoat he placed Freddy’s cuff links and fountain pen and lighter, all of which he kept buried under a pile of handkerchiefs in his bureau drawer. He locked the apartment and walked to Copenhagen Central.
At passport control on the German border he began to shake violently, but an aperitif back on board calmed his nerves enough to complete the journey. The German countryside was quiet and pastoral, a bright jeweled green in the spring sunshine.
Pockets of the city were still in ruins, but Berlin was already showing signs of becoming the lively city it had once been. Teo found the Allied Control Council headquarters easily and gave a deposition on the morning following his arrival. He was surprised to learn that Freddy was on trial for the murder of two Soviet soldiers who had tried to detain him on the evening of April twenty-fifth, only two or three hours after the last time Teo had seen him. On a break during Teo’s deposition, a young German-speaking military adjudicator sidled up to him and whispered that this trial and the defendant’s imprisonment in Germany and not the USSR were highly unusual and due to a combination of his high-ranking connections and money and certain facts that would come to light during the trial. Before Teo could ask what he meant, the break was over and the adjudicator had slipped from the room.
On the day of the trial, Teo arrived early and spent half an hour switching from seat to seat in the slowly filling courtroom. He settled, finally, on a spot close to the front but off to the side, from which he would have a clear view of the defendant’s face but from which Freddy might not be able to see him well.
Shackled and gaunt in prison uniform, Freddy was led into the courtroom at just after ten o’clock, his eyes to the floor. Seeing him sent a jolt so great through Teo’s entire body that for a moment he thought he had been shot or electrocuted, or that maybe his heart had burst open. He made a gasping noise that caused Freddy to look up, and when he saw Teo he stopped in his tracks. “Oh thank God, thank God,” he cried in German. A guard shoved him into his seat, but Freddy stole glances at Teo when he could and continued weeping.
Teo sat doubled over in pain for the first part of the proceedings. He wished to bolt but felt as though he were riveted to his chair. It was all he could do to keep from tumbling sideways to the floor.
The charges against Freddy were read to the court in German and Russian. No mention was made of his art dealings, nothing was said about Ernst Halberstadt or the boy who had been sent to his death with Teodor Levin’s documents. Freddy’s statement was read before the court, and then Freddy himself was called to the stand.
From the moment he sat in the box, Freddy did not stop looking at Teo. Teo could only glance away. It came back to him in a flood now, the humiliation, the violence, the endless hours of servicing Freddy’s obsession. He remembered, too, the tender moments, Freddy’s proclamations of love and his own confused responses. He did not know which sickened him more.
“No,” he heard Freddy saying. “It wasn’t like that at all. It was completely unintentional. I was merely desperate to return to my home in Grunewald.”
“But you did, in fact, murder two Soviet soldiers in cold blood, did you not?” said the Russian prosecutor, a bald man with an elaborate goatee. There were pauses in the proceedings as interpreters translated between languages. Teo wore a pair of headphones in order to make sure he could understand the questions, but Freddy’s answers came to him unimpeded.
“I ran them over in a mad dash to reach home. I was terribly worried about the fate of someone in my care and so …”
“ … and so you took the lives of two others in order to protect this person.”
“I repeat, it was not intentional. They were there when I rounded a corner coming out of intelligence headquarters. I was speeding. I was hoping to save a Jew hidden in my household.”
A murmur arose in the courtroom, which the judge quelled with his gavel.
“You expect the court to believe that you, a Generalleutnant, were harboring a Jew for his protection right in your home, just a few kilometers from Nazi headquarters?”
“Yes, he’d been safe there with me for six years, from the first day of the war.”
The murmur was louder this time and the judge demanded order.
Teo, his head between his knees, heard this and understood why he had been summoned to Berlin. He understood that Freddy might be acquitted if the judge were to call the deaths of the Soviet soldiers an accident, and if he were further convinced of Freddy’s humanitarianism by virtue of having harbored a Jew in secret for nearly six years.
Teo was called to the witness stand when Freddy had finished testifying. He scanned the room, taking in the judge, the guards, the grand architecture of the place, and, finally, Freddy himself, who looked far older than Teo remembered him. There seemed to be less of him, as though not only his body weight had shrunk but his very bones as well. For the first time in two years Teo felt ready to talk. A stockpile of words and images was pressing from behind his eyes and lips but he did his best to remain calm as the military prosecutor took him through the preliminaries: who he was, where he had been born, how he, a Jew, had come to live in the home of a high-ranking Nazi officer.
“And so,” the prosecutor was saying, “he took you in. Befriended you.”
“He kept me in his house under false pretenses. I was a prisoner there.”
“A prisoner? The defendant has testified that he took you to museums and cafés, that he taught you about art. He even brought you to meet his family.”
“That was all in the beginning—”
“Before there were restrictions against Jews in Berlin?”
“No, it had nothing to do with that. I was in hiding. I had no papers. Or rather, he had forged papers made for me but kept them in a safe, where I couldn’t reach them.”
“Mr. Levin, the defendant mowed down two Soviet soldiers in the last days of the war. This is not a crime we take lightly, even in the madness of those times and that place, but Soviet justice is fair and we will not punish a man unduly if his crime can be proven an accident and his behavior, as in the case of harboring a Jew and endangering his own life, is otherwise exemplary. I wish to be very clear: if you have nothing to clarify or add then this tribunal will most likely release the defendant in a relatively short time, and he will—”
“I was his slave,” Teo said in a clear voice, interrupting.
“Excuse me?”
“For nearly six years of my life I was that man’s slave,” he repeated, gesturing toward Freddy. “I was only seventeen when he lied to the police or bribed somebody and had me released to his custody and prevented me from returning to Denmark. I was a child. I didn’t know anything of the world beyond dancing, but whatever I would have become, he took it away from me. Maybe it seems insignificant when you think about the unspeakable things that happened to people during the war, but in those six years I lost … everything. My freedom. My career. My personality. Even my … sexual identity.” Teo turned to the judge, his voice rising. Bloodred panic was roiling inside him, a scarlet scrim between him and the world. “Do you know what that means? I never left the grounds of the house … I had to stay hidden from view all the time. Like a ghost. I had no … no power to make decisions about the most basic aspects of my own life.” He stopped speaking to breathe, and to steel himself. “And … he raped me, almost daily. A week before I met him I was falling in love with a girl, back in Copenhagen … but then he took over my life and I stopped knowing who I was and what I desired. Who I desired. And I still don’t know. I still don’t know who I am.”
With that, Teo gripped the arms of his chair and squeezed tight as a shout erupted from his gut through his lungs and out his throat, a sound more sharp and painful than any he had ever made, a growl and a howl and a sob rolled into one. When it ended, there was silence in the courtroom but for Teo’s panting and Freddy’s weeping.
For the next hour the judge listened and the prosecutor listened and the courtroom listened as Teo told of his imprisonment. He shocked the court by describing the acts Freddy had forced him to perform, and detailed his obsession so thoroughly that no one in the courtroom could think Freddy incapable of murdering anyone who tried to prevent him from being with Teo.
Late in the afternoon Freddy was sentenced to life imprisonment. In Siberia. As the guards escorted him from the courtroom, Freddy stopped, wild-eyed, exuberant almost. “Jimmie Lunceford, remember?” he shouted, staring at Teo. The guards were pulling him as he sang, “I’m so mad about you, say we’ll never part! I can’t live without you; you’re the keeper of my heart. So if you love me, too, Honey, keep your mind on me! Teo!” he yelled, jubilant, “with me, together, ad astra!” The last words reverberated as the guards wrestled Freddy out the door, but Teo sat motionless and winded.
Minutes later, back on his feet but dry-mouthed and shaky, Teo hurried to his hotel, fetched his small suitcase and ran the rest of the way to the train station. He had to get out of Germany, out of heartless Europe, tainted and barbarous. He would stop in Warsaw then leave the continent. America or Canada, Australia or New Zealand, these would be too difficult, he would have to wait too long for permission. He needed somewhere that would take him immediately, so he chose to leave for Palestine just as soon as he could ascertain what had become of his sister.
He settled in on the eastbound train, feeling more purposeful and even optimistic than he had in years.
Nothing in Warsaw was familiar to him, but he had left the city nearly a decade earlier, when he was only fifteen. Much of Warsaw still lay in ruins; gaping pits or piles of rubble occupied space where buildings once stood. Apart from his brief interview with Cukier, he hadn’t heard Polish spoken in so many years that he needed people to repeat themselves once or twice before he could understand them.
Reaching his old street by public transportation seemed nearly impossible, so he simply walked across Warsaw, arriving at Szara Street after two difficult hours. At first nothing made sense: the building on the corner was gone and so was the one next to it. His own building was still standing, but it looked so different—naked now, exposed—that he had trouble recognizing it. And then there were the holes, huge bullet holes running up the building nearly to the third floor. He approached slowly, wary.
He was trembling now, and stood looking up at the entryway for several long minutes before climbing the stairs into the building. Several of the names on the mailboxes were familiar to him; his own had been written over, rather sloppily, so that the L still showed through.
He climbed one flight of stairs, turned to the right and knocked. A young girl in braids opened the door and for a second Teo thought he had found Margot. Of course Margot would be a young woman now, he knew this, but for a brief moment he enjoyed the fantasy. Before he could speak, a woman loomed up behind the girl. “Yes?” she asked. “What is it?”
“I used to live here,” Teo said, “I was wondering whether you know what became of my family, the Levins, especially my sister, Margot.”
“Jew, go away,” came a deep baritone from somewhere inside the house. “Maria, close the door.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman whispered, and closed the door in Teo’s face.
Teo was stunned, but before he could knock again, a door opened behind him. “Please come in, Mr. Levin,” said a thin young woman. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Even more stunned now, Teo removed his cap and entered the house. It was a mirror image of his own family’s apartment but shabbier. He tried to remember the family that had lived in this flat but could not recall a name or a face. The young woman disappeared to one of the back rooms for a moment, then returned with an envelope in her hand.
“Would you care for some tea?” she asked. Teo nodded. The young woman gave him the envelope and went to the kitchen.
The letter was addressed to Nelly Pukarski at this address. There was no return address. Teo’s hands shook as he pulled the letter free from the envelope.
28 October 1940
Dear Nelly,
Greetings from the lovely south of our beautiful Poland! The weather is warm and pleasant here, the climate much more suited to me than Warsaw. The nuns are friendly and I have made many friends.
Please be sure to show this letter to my silly brother when he gets home today. Tell him I miss him and expect to see him soon. And remember: Make All Reasons You Know And Try Our Word In Christ Everlasting!
Your friend,
Kitty
Teo was reading the letter for the fourth time when the young woman came back with tea. He looked up from the letter, a quizzical look on his face.
“I am Nelly,” the young woman said. “My family moved here shortly after you went to Denmark. Margot and I became best friends, we were together all the time. We used to prance about pretending we were ballerinas, too.” Teo tried to smile but was not certain he had succeeded.
“That’s a picture of my mother,” she said, pointing to a blurry photograph on a small table next to Teo. “She starved to death during the war. We didn’t know she was giving us all her food.” She paused and there was an awkward silence until Teo said he was sorry.
“I live here with my father and my brother, they are working now.”
Teo lifted the letter in his hands.
“Yes, of course, Margot. I’m sorry, that’s what you are here for.” She sat down and motioned Teo to do the same. “Your parents arranged for Margot to be sent to a convent in the south. She was given a new name there, Katharina Lyczynski. This is the only letter I received from her during the war, but I believe she may still be at the convent.”
“How can I find her?” Teo asked.
“Look at the last line of her letter. It’s a code.”
He glanced at it again but still did not understand.
“Make all reasons you know and try our word in Christ everlasting,” Nelly quoted without reading it. “If you take just the first letter of each word you get ‘Mary Katowice.’ She’s at Saint Mary’s in Katowice.”
Teo glanced again at the letter, his mouth open. He looked up at Nelly, nodding. Presently he stood up, and so did Nelly.
“Please write to me,” she said.
“I will,” he said as he moved to the door. Out in the hall he turned back toward her before descending. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
“God bless,” she answered, and she watched him as he ran quickly from the street of his childhood.
Teo had not slept in a bed for several days, but he did not care. He caught the next train to Katowice, down near the Hungarian border. The train was packed, so he stood in an aisle.
Sometime after dark, as he squatted dozing, he was awakened by shouts. A drunken Pole, red-faced and disheveled, was barreling down the aisle shouting. “Jews off the train, Jews off the train! This train is for Poles only!” He stepped on people in the aisle, poking his face into each visage to see if it belonged, perhaps, to a Jew. “Oswiecim, all Jews disembark at Oswiecim!” he ranted. Teo had not realized it but understood that this train would indeed pass by Auschwitz. Just before the drunken Pole reached Teo he found his victim. “A Jew, here, a Jew!” he shouted as he stood over an elderly man, stooped and disfigured. Teo was about to leap to the old man’s defense when a whistle sounded behind him and two train guards apprehended the drunken Pole and led him away, cursing as he went.
Saint Mary’s turned out to be several kilometers from the center of Katowice. Teo set out on foot from the train station, which he reached in the early morning, after splashing down a pączek with weak but steaming coffee. He had forgotten how tasty these doughnuts were, though there was less plum jam inside than he recalled from his childhood. Several trucks and buses passed him and one offered a ride, but Teo preferred to walk. He watched the Polish farmers till their land with great oxen and passed a village market with little to offer. His small suitcase had grown heavy in his arms but he walked on in the dust and sunshine.
At the gate of the convent he pulled a heavy bell and waited. A wimpled nun greeted him.
“Good day, sister, I hope you can help me. I am here to see Katharina Lyczynski.”
“What business would you have with Sister Katharina, please?”
He was thrilled to learn she was still here, but surprised she would be called Sister.
“She is my sister, we were separated by the war.”
“I see,” said the nun. “What is your name?”
“Teodor L … Teodor,” he said, unsure whether he would gain admittance with so Jewish a surname.
“Please wait here,” she said.
Five minutes passed before she returned, during which time Teo, leaning on a stone wall clotted with moss, watched a dog chase a cat up a tall birch just inside the gate. The cat hissed from her perch while the dog barked crazily from below. “Please follow me,” said the nun as she opened the locked gate.
Teo was made to wait in a small reception room just inside a stone courtyard. When Margot entered he did not know it was she and stood staring at this young woman in a simple habit. In fact, he may not have believed it was she at all if he had not noticed the lazy eyelid she was born with.
“I have prayed for this day to come,” she said. “You must have found Nelly.”
Teo nodded. They did not embrace.
“Margot,” he said, in disbelief.
“Sister Katharina, now,” she said with a smile.
“Come with me,” he said. “I have come to take you away from here.”
She stopped smiling, became earnest. “This is my home, Teodor. It is my life. I was brought here by Our Lord Jesus Christ and saved.”
Teo sat down abruptly. A small porcelain Jesus with a forlorn expression stood in his direct line of vision. He caught the shape of a lamb in the stained-glass window on the wall next to him.
Margot sat next to him. “Are you still dancing?” she asked gently.
He shook his head.
“One day you must tell me your story,” she ventured.
He shook his head again. Then he stood to go.
“I am leaving Europe, I have no place on this continent any longer,” he said. “I’m hoping to sail for Palestine in the next few days. May I write to you when I’ve gotten settled?”
“Of course, my dear brother. We must never lose contact again.”
Teo stepped from the room and walked with his sister to the gate. “Go with God,” she said as he departed, but he did not answer.
Four days later Teo boarded a Palestine-bound ship in Trieste with a visa issued in Budapest. The heaviness in his heart did not lift even when the ship was far out to sea, but he knew at least that at twenty-five he was sailing away to a chance for a new life.