Before Berlin (Berlin Butterfly Series) Read online

  BEFORE BERLIN

  A Berlin Butterfly Series Prequel

  By Leah Moyes

  Before Berlin is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2022 Leah Moyes

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

  Cover Design: Molly Phipps/WGYC Book Design

  Publisher: SpuCruiser Media

  Editor: Dawne Anderson

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: https://www.leahmoyes.com/

  Facebook @BerlinButterfly

  Acknowledgements

  This statement has been expressed time and time again in my books but holds true today as much as the very first publication. I would not be where I am without my insightful, honest, and talented critique team. They each bring something different to the table, and I am forever grateful to Maria Carrasco, Nicole Gardner, Wendy Hargrave, Melisa Harker, Stacy Johnson, Josette Mari, Greg Moyes, Kim Moyes, Diane Norris, Susan Provost, Rachel Schnepf, Lani and Lina Taunima.

  Thank you, Dawne for your skill and talent with the pen, I appreciate your ability to see things differently and are not afraid to tell me.

  To my family and their loving support of my work and especially to my husband, Greg, for always being the first to read my manuscripts and the first to shout it from the rooftops…You’re my #1 customer!

  To Maria

  Thank you for your endless support and love

  Map designed by Samantha Thatcher

  “One day, one moment, one event…can change your life completely.” -Anonymous

  CHAPTER ONE

  17 August 1941

  “Schritt vorwärts! Kopf hoch! Arme aus!” The sharp demands in a thick German accent came swiftly. Step forward. Chin out. Arms up. I hardly had time to turn to my left to see Renia, my best friend of ten years, performing the same ridiculous movements with an equally sour-faced woman in front of her. The long horizontal line of students extended the length of our stone courtyard, chunks of concrete still littered the ground even now, nearly two years after the explosions rocked our school. Another dozen or so girls clustered near the outer gate, awaiting their turn.

  “Open your mouth.” The timeworn taskmistress inched closer to me, but even in youth I towered her by a head at the very least. She stretched her neck and leaned forward. The sulfurous scent of mustard reeked from her lips as they curved into an ardent scowl. When she spoke, her jowls wiggled loosely above her crisp, clean uniform collar, but it was the brown mole near her chin with the solitary hair protruding, that captured my full attention.

  “Do you have all of your teeth?” She inspected my mouth thoroughly.

  I nodded.

  She tugged on the end of my braid that hung freely down the right side of my chest, the lower locks nearly reaching my waist.

  “Gute länge.”

  I snuck a glance at Renia once more and wiggled my brows carefully, so this madam did not see my disrespect. What a relief the length of my hair had passed her inspection. I fought the giggle building in my throat. Such an odd thing for her to find so satisfactory.

  A tall, reedy woman shadowed the ill-tempered one. She clutched a simple clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other.

  “Mache Notizen.” The demanding one pointed for her to take notes, then turned back to me. “What is your name?”

  I recognized my good fortune of having learned German years ago, even before they arrived in my city. While other fellow classmates struggled with the foreign demands, I understood her well enough.

  “Aleksandra.” I answered proudly, named after my oma, my mother’s mama, who died before my birth.

  “Family name?”

  “Jaworski.”

  “Age?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “Kennkarte?”

  I pulled the small, beige paper book from my pocket. I rarely went anywhere without it since its issuance from the Generalne Gubernatorstwo at the beginning of the year. She reached for it and scanned its contents carefully, focusing her attention on the black and white photograph with my thumbprint and signature above the official seal. She turned the page for my family lineage.

  “Schmidt?” she grunted. “Maternal?”

  “Yes, Frau, my oma came from East Prussia.”

  “Hmmm.” She handed it to the other woman and faced me again.

  “Turn around.”

  I rotated my back towards her. Why is she inspecting my person so closely? My brother, Ivan, who had been enlisted through conscript eighteen months before had not been scrutinized so closely when the German soldiers came to our home.

  My breath hitched at a wayward thought. A faint recollection emerged from an event I tried hard to forget…a collection of people—people with a unified belief—seized from their homes, lined up in the street and marched away…but I am not Jewish! And as my papers just proved, I am not entirely Polish either—I justified, quite aware of the hostility directed towards Poles. When my grandmother, Aleksandra Schmidt, came to Łódź to attend art school, she met and married my grandfather, choosing never to return to Prussia.

  The woman pinched my side. The movement made me jump. I was ticklish there.

  “Stand still,” she snapped. Though she had a solid grip on my waist there wasn’t much to grasp and the tighter she held on the more it hurt.

  She spoke to her scribe. “Tall, but skinny. Good posture and hips. Send her to Medical.”

  Offended at her command to see the doctor, I scrunched my nose. I am quite healthy, I wanted to argue. Other than a scare of scarlet fever at the age of four, I hardly got sick. And at this very moment, I could outrun anyone in this school, including the old bag.

  The SS’s sudden disruption of our school day had come unexpectedly. This had happened often in the beginning of the German occupation, but not recently, and none of the previous appearances required us to stand outside for hours in the sweltering heat.

  Within a week of their arrival into Poland, the Germans had closed almost all the schools in the city…but not this one. New instructors, altered curriculum, and stifling rules were put in place. Rumors circulated amongst the girls as to why we were spared—whispered conjectures included suggestions as eccentric as our headmistress being involved in the Third Reich, to training a new generation of Hitler youth who could also offer childbearing qualities, to the most realistic…we all had German familial ties. I ignored them all. Though we no longer had our beloved Polish teachers, Polish language, literature, culture, and arts, I excelled in math and sciences and, above all, being in school meant being away from the horrors and atrocities occurring outside of it.

  “Dreh dich um.”

  When I turned forward again at the command of the clipboard woman, the female soldier had moved on to the next girl. The scribe scribbled something on a piece of paper then shoved it into my hand.

  “Siebzehn,” I whispered as I read it. The number 17 appeared on the square sheet.

  The Germans gave us little choice but to follow every direction given. The blatant slaughtering of Poles proved not only their power, but their hatred for our countrymen. My family learned first-hand the consequences of having a father in the government. As a Parliamentarian, he should have been killed. Instead, the new commanders forced him to labor as the liaison between the Poles and our new German May
or, Albert Leister…that, and a reminder bullet to each knee—they claimed he didn’t need to walk to do his job. His brother, Borys, and a dozen other men who worked in his office were not so fortunate. Determined to be a threat by the intelligenzaktion, they were detained and sent to the Radogoszcz prison in November, then executed the following May 1940.

  From the moment the soldiers entered our classrooms this morning through now, I hadn’t been afraid. Though they were stern and forceful, nothing in their conversations led me to believe our lives were threatened.

  This was far from the invasion in September 1939.

  Though Łódź was smaller than Warsaw, its location became key to the German’s continued pursuits against enemies of the state. Our lack of adequate equipment and poor defenses, especially against Blitzkrieg, allowed for an effortless seizure when our Polish army collapsed in mere days under the pressure of the Third Reich.

  Within that first month, not only did they sever our transportation, but they also carried out mass searches, committed crimes against the population, public executions, restructured the government with German officials, issued occupation decrees, renamed the city as Litzmannstadt, and annexed us into Nazi, Germany.

  My mind easily slipped back to those early days…the deafening sounds of gunfire, explosions, and above all, the horrifying screams that were forever etched in my memory. At fourteen, I lived through the worst nightmare imaginable or so I thought with my limited life experience…until I witnessed the expulsion, the process in which the Germans managed the Jewish population.

  They claimed that the people of the Jewish faith were diseased and brought filth and degradation upon us, but especially upon our new landlords. By February of 1940, the Judes had been removed to a ghetto—a controlled residential quarter in the northeastern section of town—surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. My friend Erela, along with her parents and sister, who lived in the flat across from us, were subjected to their swift removal and forced relocation. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

  Occasionally, Mama and I would take the streetcar past the fences. Sometimes I would cover my eyes, afraid to see the downtrodden and defeated people. A people who just the year earlier were our baker, tailor, and seamstress. Then two months ago, train cars full of Romas arrived at the ghetto. Frau Weber, Mama’s hairdresser, said the new detainees came from Austria. I overheard her conversation while she washed Mama’s hair one afternoon. Her husband, Herr Weber, oversaw the Judenräte—the Jewish Council—in the ghetto and reported that the Romas were sent here temporarily prior to their transition to another camp.

  “There are not enough resources for those filthy gypsies,” Frau Weber exclaimed, callously unaware of my mother’s cringe. “The Judes are already seven or eight to a room and nearly twenty in each flat,” she continued. “While I don’t care much for the Judes, I cannot tolerate the Romas. The quicker they move them to an extermination camp, the better.”

  Mama never went back to have her hair done by Frau Weber, but she also never discussed with me the definition of an extermination camp. Something I eventually came to learn from Renia.

  Over the past year, the number of residents in the ghetto increased and decreased with the constant arrival of trains. New faces replaced old though none seemed to last very long. I calculated the changes from the rotating children who lingered against the fence. The neighborhood had always had an eeriness to it but now a dark cloud hovered unceasingly. I now went entirely out of my way to avoid it.

  The stories that circulated about town varied as to where the ghetto residents were evacuated to. Some claimed deportations were to other cities, countries, or work camps, but I never forgot what Frau Weber called them and when Pan Nowak, our butcher, said with undeniable certainty that they were sent to a nearby village called Chelmno, a hint of hope sparked within me…until he elaborated.

  “Not the town mind you and not for better accommodations.” He weighed the last of the veal.

  Mama froze in place, but I watched him curiously.

  Wrapping the meat in paper, he continued, “To a country estate specifically used as a killing center.”

  Mama gasped and looked to me, then before she could stop him, he added, “They use poisonous gas.”

  Mama’s beautiful complexion drained of all color. Her red lips pulled into a tight line and, though I could not see her eyes, her lashes blinked repeatedly. When he finally handed over the meat, Mama slipped the money down on the counter and departed quickly with me tightly in tow and we began a very silent walk home.

  That night, I prayed for Erela. I didn’t want to believe the stories, I wanted to trust that she was somewhere safe and happy. She was by far one of the kindest girls I had ever met.

  “Weitergehen!” The terse voice of the clipboard woman ordering me to move on brought me back to the present. I followed her long, thin finger in the direction of another door, but before I exited, I peeked back at Renia. She stood a few girls down from me and, though her tyrant had moved past her, she apparently hadn’t gotten her square number yet to be dismissed. When she brushed her brown curls aside to reveal a smile, I winked at her before I turned away. We will have a good laugh about this at lunch.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I exited the courtyard and reentered the classroom, it looked nothing like the room I had left earlier that morning. The desks had been removed and in their place were long tables separated by steel partitions and thin curtains both in front of the table and one on each side, but because they hardly covered much, I could see Gizela from my mathematics class sitting on one end of her table in a robe of sorts. Her shoulders were slumped and her head lowered. She must be sick. I tried to recall the supper conversation with my parents the night before, but nothing was said about an illness spreading through the town.

  I stopped in the center of the room, unsure of where to go next, until a man in a long white coat hustled toward me. His ungainly height forced his spectacles to slide down his shiny nose as he eyed me warily and grabbed the paper number from my fingers.

  “Siebzehn,” he hollered the number out and another woman approached with yet another clipboard. I bit the inside of my cheek and shifted nervously to my other foot. This could not be about sending young girls into battle—that’s preposterous…isn’t it?

  Due to the uncertainty of our future, even before the war began, my father’s keen foresight and sound finances gave me the best education a child could be privileged to have. My all-girls school was one of the finest in town. Along with my skills in numbers, I took easily to foreign languages. Outside of our native Polish tongue, and German, I spoke a little Russian, and was currently learning English from my neighbor.

  Though many of my elders mourned the hope of a free Poland, they were quite vocal about the value of other languages. “Knowing multiple languages, little Aleksandra,” Pani Kalinowski said, “is quite equal to survival.” Eight years after her comment, I have come to understand the wisdom of such a statement and valued our lessons immensely.

  “Afleuchten.” The woman waved for me to follow her. I passed three of the partitions before she rolled one of them away revealing an empty table. “Sit.”

  Unsure whether she meant the table or the chair, I chose the sole chair in the space. I would do everything in my power to convey how healthy I am. Maybe Gizela is sick, but I am most assuredly not.

  “Name?” The woman’s eyes left the clipboard only briefly.

  “Aleksandra Jaworski.”

  “Your age?”

  “Sixteen.” I sighed. They have already asked me this. Why didn’t the clipboard woman from outside just forward the information? And where is my Kennkarte? It had not been returned to me.

  “Have you been ill recently?”

  “No.”

  “Broken any bones?”

  “No.”

  “When was your last bleed?”

  “Bleed?”

  “Your monthly?”

  My brows curved inward
and I stuttered for the first time. “L—last week.”

  “Have you had any imbecility in your family?”

  I blinked twice then quickly answered so she didn’t believe I was the simpleton. “Uh, no, no nothing like that.”

  “Do you have all of your teeth?”

  I nodded, waiting for her to look in my mouth like the female soldier did, but she didn’t.

  “Zieh deine Sachen aus.”

  “What?” My heart thumped heavily in my chest. I could not have heard her correctly. Why would she need me to remove my clothing? I am not sick! She repeated the same sentence only with an urgency now pointing to the table. She held up a thin piece of fabric that unraveled to a robe as she lifted it up. “Put this on.”

  “Why?” My jaw tightened. “I am not ill.” I responded in German so there was no chance of a misunderstanding.

  “Do it now.” Her stare pierced me threateningly. I waited but she made no move to leave my temporary quarters. I turned away from her and removed my collar and blouse slowly. While I unbuttoned my skirt, I desperately tried to devise a way to escape. I am fast. I could outrun her, the doctor, the female soldier, and any number of squaddies they had walking around here. What I could not outrun are bullets and each of those soldiers carried a weapon.

  “Quickly.” She demanded.

  I pointed to my camisole and underwear. “These too?”

  “Ja.”

  I exhaled slowly and removed my undergarments with my back to her once again. I had never undressed in front of anyone besides my mother and that had not occurred for many years.

  I put my arms in the lightweight robe and closed it tight with my arms across my torso. Only my tan leather shoes and knee-high woolen socks extended out the bottom. The woman didn’t waste any time and grabbed my wrist, pulling me to the end of the table.

  “Sit.” She directed.

  I did as I was told, but my cheeks heated with frustration.