Chapter 3 - You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico

Before she was even two years old, Christa had lost her father in World War II, been excommunicated from the Päffgen family and been separated from her mother and forced to live in a violent orphanage. Yet, once reunited with Grete, the brutality did not end, as the war became more intense. Nico later recalled hiding in the family bathtub as explosives rained down around the small apart­ment where they lived in Cologne.

Helma Wolff was already in Berlin with her son (Nico’s cousin) Ulrich, or ‘Ulli’ for short. Like Grete, Helma had lost her husband in the war, and she found herself bringing up Ulli alone. However, she had managed to enrol her son in a school, find a job at a nearby military base as a secretary and move into an apartment she described as being comprised of ‘one and a half rooms’. It was 1940 when Grete appeared at Helma’s door, seeking refuge for herself and Christa. For a short time, the two sisters shared the cramped space with their children, who were just six months apart in age. It was not long, however, until they received a letter from their father, beseeching them to leave the city and return to their home in the comparatively rural German town of Lübbenau.

Fifty years later, Helma recalled the daily terror and near brushes with death during those last days in Berlin, as the Germans strug­gled to remain in control. ‘The air attacks grew stronger,’ she said. ‘One night I had to run through an inferno of flames with my son in my arms. The strength of the flames lifted us up in the air. I had the sensation we were already burning. Later, my workplace was destroyed.’ According to Grete’s Meldekarte, she and Christa fled the capital for the family abode on 7 December 1940. Helma and Ulli followed six months later.

Though only an hour’s drive from Berlin, Lübbenau, at first glance, seemed worlds apart from the war-torn city. Leafy, green and lush, the town is located within the Spreewald forest. Nico described No. 4 Güterbahnhofstrasse – her grandparents’ house – as a massive four-storey brick building with a large outdoor garden, situated alongside the local freight railway line. As an adult, she would often comment to friends that passing trains reminded her of childhood.

At the time of their arrival, Albert, Nico and Ulli’s grandfather, or ‘Opa’,3 as they called him, was a railroad switchman for his town. His job was to check the tail lights of the trains as they lumbered by his assigned station. Albert’s southern position controlled a vital intersection during the war, with one line taking trains from Berlin to Görlitz and Poland, the other to Dresden and Czechoslovakia. When the Reich invaded Prague, he had to direct trains full of troops and guns, switching the tracks when Germany entered Poland. He saw huge carriages packed with Jews on their way to Silesia,4 yet felt powerless to do anything: any questioning of authority could jeopardize the safety of his family.

It was mandatory for women to join in the war effort, hence both sisters spent their days away from home in different jobs. Helma continued in her position at the military station, commuting in and out of Berlin, while Grete was taken on by a factory near the house that built flying boats. This left the children in the care of their grandparents – Albert and grandmother Oma (her actual first name is unknown) – each youngster the other’s main companion. ‘We spent a lot of time together, my aunt, Christa, my mother and me,’ says Ulli. ‘We [would play] in the courtyard. Christa was always afraid of the geese, which were roaming free. When we played, she was funny, foolish and silly. She liked to be entertained. She was a very giggly girl, but not in a relaxed way.’ Another favourite mem­ory was of Ulli receiving literal bowl haircuts from Albert, an activ­ity that would endlessly amuse his cousin.

Albert loomed large as both protective patriarch and childhood distraction, telling the children elaborate stories and classic German myths. Ulli recalls, ‘He was wonderful; the most entertaining part of our day was listening to him. You must bear in mind that there were few books around then, no children’s comics, no magazines for us, a boring radio service, and, of course, no television. The cinema was very popular, but not in Lübbenau – we had to wait until we were back in Berlin. So our Opi was a fantastic source of entertain­ment to set our imaginations racing.’

When not with her cousin or grandfather, Christa’s favourite place to play was in the Gothic graveyard adjacent to the house. Filled with trees, flowers and bushes, crumbling memorial ­statues and spiralling ivy, the tranquil environment provided plenty of stimulation for the young girl’s blossoming imagination. ‘She spent so much time in there, sometimes just wandering around,’ Ulli remembers. ‘I can’t think what she found to do. I think she enjoyed its quietness. On the other side of the house was all this machinery and movement, but here it was natural, and for children it held a certain mystery.’

While the bucolic moments of family life provided some stability for the child, the daily realities of the war’s atrocities burned into Christa’s mind. Nico wrote about these early years, recalling in her diary:

In 1942, the trains passed our house to take the Jews to Auschwitz, I was only four years old, but my family and neighbors waited by the railroad fences to give them food and water, but the guards whipped them away from our reach. I remember very clearly how many hungry people I saw when the trains came to a halt. Freight trains and barbwire windows, the rail line to the camp has lost its tracks … The ribbon of death. I was sighing to my cousin Ulli and refused to wash with soap made from human bones, the material for clothing had been made from human hair, lampshades from human tattooed skin.

She goes on to vividly describe another macabre scene from her childhood, of ‘dead bodies lying on the sidewalk in Luebbenau, Berlin, any other small Village in Poland’.

*

By the mid-1940s, the family was used to sporadic influxes of people coming into their town. Tourism in the region was spurred on by Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’, abbreviated as KdF), an initiative set up by the German Labour Front, a government organ­ization created to promote the ideals of the Nazi party. The notion behind the KdF was to make middle-class leisure activities available to a wider swathe of the population. With its landscape of marshes, forests, pine trees and sand dunes, Spreewald was a popular week­end escape for those taking advantage of the KdF scheme, all des­perate for a temporary reprieve from the war. Tourism pamphlets from the time capitalized on the contrast between Berlin’s war-torn urban rubble and the natural beauty of Spreewald, describing its inhabitants as ‘honest peasants’ who ‘held fast to simple certainties in a land where sky and water meet by nature’s sandbanks’. Though the weekly invasion of KdF participants brought outsiders to the rural town, the war still seemed far removed.

This changed dramatically in 1944, when the Soviets began push­ing the Germans back from some of their former strongholds across Europe. Information was slow to trickle into Lübbenau, and the family did not hear of the defeat of the Germans in Poland, France or Belgium, although refugees and lone soldiers began to appear in the town en route to Berlin. Autumn arrived. While the war raged around them, life went on. Ulli and Christa began school. The cur­riculum focused on indoctrinating children with the racial ideas of the Nazis and having them pledge allegiance to Hitler. Textbooks had been rewritten at the start of the Nazi regime, especially on the topics of history and biology, to reflect and promote Germany’s ‘greatness’, Aryan ‘supremacy’ and anti-Semitism. Course work was separated by sex, similar to the teaching offered by the orphanage Nico had stayed at several years before. Boys were trained to be good soldiers, and they studied eugenics, physical education and the Nazi rendition of history. From an early age, girls were taught to be good Aryan wives and mothers, with an emphasis on home economics, the omnipresent eugenics and physical education.

By the start of 1945, the Allies had entered Germany, bringing the Nazi regime to its knees on its home turf. Most of the country was invaded by the Allies, specifically the Soviet troops who conquered the region. On 30 April, the capture of the Reichstag – the German parliament building – signalled the defeat of Nazi Germany. Nazi soldiers who had been stationed in and around Spreewald began to leave, warning the townspeople of Lübbenau that the invad­ing Russians would steal, rape and pillage, thus spreading fear and trepidation throughout the native population. Thankfully, Albert’s knowledge of the soldiers’ language helped keep the family and their neighbours relatively safe. He would occasionally share stories, alcohol and food with the Russians to keep them on side. Yet Ulli has dark, dangerous memories of this time, saying how it ‘wasn’t so nice. These Russian soldiers were looking for women. It was every­where the same in those days.’

Despite the relatively secure standing provided by Albert in Lübbenau, both Grete and Helma longed to get back to Berlin and left at the first chance they had.