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209 D Chapter Sixty-One d a neW Job The first days of spring, so eagerly awaited, produced not only sweet-smelling flowers and green leaves on the trees,but also a revolting stench of sewage flooding the houses and even the streets,from broken pipes in baths,toilets,and gutters,until then mercifully frozen.But not even this calamity could diminish the overwhelming joy of having gotten through the first crucial post-war winter. John McGraw, still stationed in Hamburg and with whom I had managed to keep in touch thanks to the help of the British military stationed in West Berlin, suggested that I now return; he missed me, and his outfit was able to offer me a paid position. In view of the fact that there were still no regular passenger trains and no traveling passes for German civilians, this was easier said than done. Much as I relished the idea of being swept across the border by another angel in Soviet uniform, the chances that this were to happen a second time were pretty slim. Someone gave me the tip that, in order to get across to the British zone, all I had to do was enter one of the refugee camps in the city, pretend that I was a displaced person from the East, and let myself be shipped by train to the West. After one day in a mobbed camp, I was carted with hundreds of others to the Grunewald train station in the British sector to board a freight train. The date was April 2, 1946. The Grunewald station had been the main deportation point for thousands of Berlin Jews on their way to the camps. I wondered if the German Reichsbahn received the same compensation for our transportation, having charged Jews four pfennigs per kilometer in a freight car without windows, heat, water, food, or sanitary installations. The extermination of the Jews was, aside from being a monstrous crime, a well-organized, lucrative business from which quite a few individuals and organizations profited very nicely. No Jew was killed without being robbed before as well as after death.Stripped during his or her lifetime of businesses, homes, and all personal belongings, in death they still provided clothes, eyeglasses , gold fillings, bridges, and hair to be used by German industry. Finally, the ashes of their bones served to fertilize the fields, to the benefit of the “master race.” In sharp contrast to the Jews, we all boarded this freight train of our own free will, we were not deported,and none of us would starve.As far as comfort in the cattle cars was concerned , aside from some straw scattered on the floor and a few pails in a corner where the passengers could relieve themselves in full view,there was none.During the process of being screened by the British Military Police, I was stopped and politely asked to step aside.What Part two 210 now? My false papers were in order, weren’t they? Of course, I was told, but with my command of English, I was considered a godsend. Would I act as the official train interpreter? Rejoicing about this unexpected stroke of luck, I let myself be taken to a regular train car, centered between ten cattle cars. Sergeant Major Tom Atkinson, in charge of the train, informed me that they expected about two thousand refugees going west, accompanied by a troop of armed British soldiers, protecting the passengers from marauding Russians and Poles while en route to the city of Hannover.Although the distance between Berlin and Hannover was a mere two hundred miles, it would take the freight train at least twenty hours. My bundles were stashed in the British-occupied car, equipped with a number of cots and benches as well as a regular wood-burning stove with the pipe through the roof. There was one snag, however, and I was told to prepare myself for it; at the frontier, in the middle of the night, the train would stop for the Russians to board in order to examine the passengers’papers,and it was not a good idea for a German citizen to be found traveling with the British military. So, just before the border, the train would come to a halt, giving me a chance to jump out, climb into the next freight car, and stay there until the procedure was over. Once the train stopped a second time, the signal that we had...

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