A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [69]
The couple who lived below them had been Nazis—not major figures, but what came to be known as “little Nazis.” They had been Nazi party snitches on the block. Mia avoided them, but one day she was walking with her baby girl, and the woman came up and peeked into the baby carriage. Her face rumpled into a goofy smile. “What a nice baby! What a lovely baby!” she cooed, while Mia stood in silence thinking that only three years earlier this same woman would not have allowed this baby to live.
After that Mia and the woman talked almost every day, although they never discussed anything of substance. The other woman didn't seem to mind Mia's reserve. How was she to know that Mia was normally a very different kind of person? The woman loved the Lehmann baby. When Mia had to go out, especially when the weather was bad and she didn't want to take her outside, she would leave the baby with her new neighbor. The neighbor would always visit on their daughter's birthday and bring chocolate, which was hard to get in the Soviet zone after 1949. She had contacts in the West.
WHEN WERNER AND HELLE HANDLER returned to Germany to begin their great task, they had nowhere to go. The Polish German border had been redrawn again, and the town Werner's family had adopted because it was in Germany, was now also in Poland. His only living relatives had escaped to South America. Helle's family, whose books traced their lineage back to the Spanish expulsion of 1492, was also gone. Her mother had last been seen in Minsk, and her father, she now learned, had been taken out in front of the inmates of Buchenwald and beaten to death. But that Germany was defeated and in ruins. They would help build the new one, a Germany that completely broke with its past.
They arrived in Hamburg, and Werner's only skill was as a woodworker. Surely, they reasoned, Germany would welcome dedicated young people who were ready to build the new Germany. Handler wrote to the Northwest German Radio station that he had returned to Germany to do something useful and that he had heard they were offering training in radio. I am back with no qualifications; will you train me? That was all he had to say. They took him immediately. There was a great demand for Germans who had never been Nazis.
With his tough, direct manner, Handler felt the ice of the cold war early. He was not a political sophisticate like Mia Lehmann, who had been active in the Communist party for more than fifteen years, or her husband, who had been thrown out of school in 1934 for forming a Marxist cell among his classmates. Handler was not even a member of the Communist party. He was simply an angry Hamburg radio journalist with a sense of mission, preaching the new socialist democratic anti-Nazi Germany when and wherever he had a chance. In late 1947 he was one of a number of journalists who were fired in what seemed to be a general housecleaning in western-sector media.
Shortly after that he was offered a job with Berliner Rundfunk, or Berlin Radio, the Soviet-controlled German radio station for Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. The Handlers moved to an apartment in the British sector of Berlin, where the radio station was located. To them there was nothing political about the sectors—it was all occupied Germany. But