A whistle-stop tale

At the moment though, Deutschland’s peoples, Ossies or Wessies, and the resentments and difficulties of reunification were the least of my considerations. My thoughts were elsewhere, in two quite disparate places actually. One mind had me out of November’s whipping wind and in a warm bath of a luxurious room in Berlin. A few floors above me, Sylvester Stallone was a guest of the penthouse suite. Two days before I had shared a revolving door with him: he was coming into the five-star hotel; I was heading out- and I had nearly missed him, so unexpectedly diminutive was the Hollywood star.

The second of my minds was in a starker place. It was called Sachsenhausen and it had first been a concentration camp/ training centre for SS officers during World War II then for five years after the war, it was a Soviet “special” camp. Our company of 15 had just toured Sachsenhausen. It was small, not by any measure a mass execution camp, yet the records showed approximately 160,000 prisoners died there from disease, exposure and exhaustion or they were simply executed. It was a cold and depressing place, made bleaker by autumn’s freezing gusts. Now we, the Argentinian and I, had decided that Sachsenhausen had left us in not much spirit to have lunch in Oranienburg. We had left the group.

Thus were we standing here hunched on this platform getting a thrashing from a bitter November wind and that’s why we were now hopping quickly into the train to Berlin which had less than a minute ago arrived. The carriage we boarded was one of several empty ones so we uncurled our limbs and expressed gratitude for snug seats and for the warmth pouring out of the carriage’s heaters, even if it was rapidly cooled by the chill blowing in through the train’s open door. The door soon closed and the train lurched forward. But then it just as abruptly stopped and we were not moving off, not chugging away from Sachsenhausen and Oranienburg and back to Berlin and Stallone.

Five minutes passed and the train hadn’t budged. Then the carriage door slid open. What was this? Were we never leaving? So much for German efficiency and punctuality, we quipped. But at least we were fairly warm. Suddenly, through the door, and into our compartment, slipped a slip of a man. Wait a minute. Wasn’t this the man from Sachsenhausen, the fellow foreigner who had with such deference asked if he could join our tour group? But hadn’t he stayed on in Oranienburg? No, he said. He too had opted to return right away to Berlin. Could he sit with us? Yes, of course.

A minute later, the door closed and the train pushed off. Our companion thanked us again for allowing him to sit with us. You don’t have to, we said. But yes I do he insisted. Did you not notice the commotion before, he asked. Did you not realise that the train had had a false start? Yes, we said, but we hadn’t the slightest idea why. Well the train stopped because of him, he explained. He had just been attacked by a group of neo-Nazi youths as he sat in an empty compartment much lower down the line and had barely been saved from injury or worse because someone on the platform had seen what was happening and had alerted the station police a second before the train had departed. Otherwise he would have been locked in a carriage of a moving train with four violent, racist youths.

We told him how sorry we were. We were shocked. And shaken. We had seen the pack of teens at the station but had paid them little heed because we were first, too preoccupied with trying to catch the right train and then, when we got to the correct platform we were too busy trying to ward off the blows we were getting from Oranienburg’s icy gusts. My reporter colleague said that in his opinion, these were youths on the prowl who had seen three “minorities”: a lone Asian man and then a Latin giant with a black woman and had decided that it would be easier to pick on the first “minority”. But what, he observed if they had decided to take us all on? His words were more chilling than Sachsenhausen or the November wind.

We had only thawed a bit when some 20 minutes later the train arrived in Berlin. Our new friend headed for the subway and for his rectory: he was a priest, a missionary from India. We caught a cab to our hotel- the man from Argentina wanted to file a story instantly on the extraordinary twist of fate that had tossed us from the Nazis of Germany’s past to the country’s present day neo-Nazis.

And me? I had come to Germany determined to see as much as possible. I had been energised by the freshness of Bonn, moved by the Cologne Cathedral, intoxicated by the architecture and gardens of Munich. Berlin, capital once more, was massive, alive and cosmopolitan. Today, in Oranienburg, I had caught a glimpse of Germany’s ugly underbelly. I had seen it all.

suz@itrini.com