Read Online Stattin Station by David Downing - Free Book Online

deeper blackouts. Accidents were common on the S-Bahn in such conditions, with passengers opening doors and stepping out onto what they mistakenly hoped was a platform.
    Russell got off to change at Westkreuz, and stood on the Stadtbahn platform in the near complete darkness for what seemed like ages, listening to the murmur of invisible people and watching the patchwork of glows as passengers on the opposite platform dragged on their cigarettes. He would be arriving late at the Blumenthals, not that it mattered Jews were not allowed out after 8pm, which certainly simplified the task of finding them at home. Especially now that their telephones had all been disconnected.
    The Blumenthals were one of several Jewish families that he - and often Effi as well - visited on a fairly regular basis. At first this had been work-inspired, part of Russell's attempt to keep track of what was happening to Berlin's Jewish community as the war went on. It quickly became clear that they could also help in many ways, some small, others increasingly significant. Ration tickets could be passed on, and news of the outside world did something to lessen the sense of helplessness and isolation which many Jews now felt. There was also the sense, for him and for Effi, that they were keeping the doors of their own world open, refusing to be trapped in what a German colleague had once called 'the majority ghetto'. And some of the Jews had become friends, insofar as true friendship was possible in such artificially skewed relationships.
    A train finally rattled in behind its thin blue light, and Russell had no trouble finding a seat in a barely-lit carriage. Several Jews were standing together at one end of the carriage, presumably on their way home from a ten-hour shift at Siemens. They were not talking to each other, and he could almost feel their determination not to be noticed.
    Leaving Borse Station, he picked a path up the wide Oranienburgerstrasse with the help of the whitened kerbs and an occasional tram. The Blumenthals - Martin, Leonore and their daughter Ali - had a small two-room apartment in one of the narrow streets behind the burnt-out ruins of the New Synagogue. This was reasonably spacious by current standards, but something of a come-down for the family, who had once owned a large house in Grunewald and several shops selling musical scores and instruments. Martin now worked in a factory out near the Central Stockyards, cutting and treating railway sleepers. He was the same age as the century, a year younger than Russell, but he looked considerably older. Hook-nosed and with protuberant lips, he looked like a caricature Der Sturmer Jew; by contrast, his wife Leonore was simply dark-haired and petite, while his seventeen year-old daughter Ali, with her fair hair and green eyes, could have passed an audition for Tristan's Isolde.
    Leonore answered the door, apprehension shifting to relief when she saw who it was. Martin leapt up to offer his right hand, his left clutching the copy of Faust he seemed to be forever reading. 'Come in, come in,' he urged. 'It's good to see you. I'm fed up with talking to other Jews - their only topic of conversation is themselves, and how terrible everything is.'
    'Everything is terrible,' Russell said, refusing Leonore's armchair and sitting himself down at the table. As if to prove his point, she picked up the coat she'd obviously been working on and continued with her task of re-attaching a yellow star.
    'Yes, but it serves no purpose to talk of nothing else. Everything passes, even these... gentlemen. America will enter the war, and that will be that. It's strange - the last war they entered, I was a boy shooting at them. This time I shall invite every last one of them around for dinner.'
    Russell laughed. 'I think Leonore might have something to say about that.'
    'Chance would be a fine thing,' Leonore said. She was upset about something, Russell thought.
    'It will happen,' Martin insisted. 'Tell me,