THE BERLIN FLOWER SHOP
THE BERLIN FLOWER SHOP
Berlin, Friedrich Street Train Station
“When the bombs began to fall, that was the worst. We’d hear a whistling, then an explosion and the floors shook, like an earthquake. Windows shattered and the walls rattled,” her hands mimicked the motion. The Great Depression was terrible but the bombs were the worst!” I was listening to Frau Rosen in Rosen’s Floral Shop inside the Friedrich Street Train Station in central Berlin, Germany.
The station, in the heart of Berlin, is a mix of screeching commuter trains, workers, families, and tourists jumping on and off cars, and the smell of bratwursts and coffee from the kiosks on the platforms. The soaring cantilevered roof spreads for acres up and down the tracks, sunlight streaming through the glass walls. The station has been the beating heart of the city since 1882.
I had a couple of hours between trains and had wandered into the floral shop to get a closer look at a black and white photo in the display window. The photo showed a smiling young man, hands on hips, in an old fashioned cap standing in front of this store, flowers spilling out of buckets arranged on the pavement near him, old-type lettering, ‘Rosen’s Fine Florals’, stenciled in an arc across the plate glass. Inside, the shop appeared filled with customers and the front door stood open. Under the photo was written, ‘1887’. Frau Rosen, seeing my interest, came over to explain the picture.
“That’s my grandfather,” she pointed to the man in the photo, “he founded the business in 1887, shortly after the station opened. My father took it over when Opa died and Papa ran it through World War I, the Depression and the start of World War II. I was about 15 or 16 when he left for the Russian front. He never returned and I took over the shop.” She was now in her late 90s, small and smartly dressed. “And I’m still here”. I congratulated her on her success but she waved away the compliment. “That’s what we all did. If you wanted to eat, to live, you worked. No one told me I was too young or that a woman couldn’t run a business. But I did dress like a boy for a few years, in the late 1940s.” I asked her why.
“The Russians. This station was in the Soviet Zone. I was a young woman so to protect myself, I dressed in pants, wore my Papa’s cap, cut my hair short and wore no makeup. Sometimes I’d smear a bit of dirt on my face. It worked. I was never raped. The soldiers didn’t want flowers. All they wanted was vodka so they never bothered me. The Reds were awful but yes, the bombing was worse. I was one of the lucky ones. I survived both.”
Her two young employees waited on the constant stream of customers, the bell above the door tinkling each time it opened. I said I didn’t mean to take her time, that the store was busy, but she waved a hand to dismiss the remark. I asked her what the Friedrich Street Station was like during the years of Soviet occupation and the now vanished German Democratic Republic, known in the west as East Germany.
“The Soviet years were chaotic with the soldiers and the harsh regulations. The Reds left sometime in the 1950s, I think. In 1961 the East German government set up barriers in the station to stop us from fleeing to the West. This station became the main border crossing between East and West Germany. I was in the East but the other end of the building was sort of in the West, or at least it was used by Westerners to change trains.”
She was right. All of Friedrich Station was in the East but the zigzagged routes of the #6 subway and a commuter line, both with stops mostly in the West, converged at the Friedrich Station. The #6 and commuter stops in the East were bricked up by the isolationist East German government. Those were called Ghost Stations by the locals, stations the #6 and the commuter trains passed through but where no one could get on or off except the ghosts. At Friedrich, Westerners got off the #6 and changed to the computer line or vice verse but had to do that in an isolated part of the station, never ‘officially’ entering the East.
“The station was divided in ‘61. If we looked over the barriers, we could see the Westerners getting on and off their trains, well dressed, well fed, smiling, reading real newspapers, but we weren’t allowed over to that side. The government had set up three sets of passport control booths.” I shook my head. “Yes, three. The soldiers checked passports three times before they would let anyone from the East through to the trains going to the West. A person had to have special papers to do that. Few of us did. So all we did was watch.”
I thought back to the late 1960s, to my own experience at the Friedrich Station. I lived in Munich at the time, a teenager in school, and had hitchhiked to Berlin on a long weekend break. Except for being arrested at the East Germany/West Berlin border and held for 24 hours because of an ID mixup, the trip was uneventful. I had gone into the Friedrich Station on the #6 to switch to the commuter line, and while I waited, I peered over the barriers and passport booths into the East. The station was grimy and smelled of urine, the windows thick with dust. When I returned 22 years later in the summer of 1990, the station had not physically changed much but the atmosphere was vastly different.
Frau Rosen told me about a system of tunnels and corridors under the station linking East and West, and how the passages were carefully guarded during the Cold War so no one could cross secretly. “In August, 1961, the Wall went up around all of West Berlin and cut it off from the world, made it an island,” she said. “We thought the people over there would starve to death during the Blockade when Stalin cut the rail and road links to the West but they didn’t starve or freeze. The Americans flew in all the food and coal they needed. Stalin was humiliated and we cheered!”
The Soviets had to build a wall to stop East Germans from fleeing to the West through the open door that was West Berlin. During the 16 years from WWII’s end to 1961, East Germany lost a fifth of its population, mostly highly skilled people, doctors, teachers, plumbers and electricians, before the wall went up. “Life on this side was hard. Little food and what we had was awful. Often no heat or electricity, but they told us we lived in a workers’ paradise! What lies! Thank goodness for the government employees who worked near here. They still bought flowers, thank God. Kept my shop alive.”
I asked her if she had ever read the spy novels by Kanon and Silva and others that had made Friedrich Street Station famous. Yes she had, but the intrigue in those books was exaggerated.
“I remember spies being exchanged. The building was blocked off for an hour or so, soldiers marched a guy in, another one on the ‘other’ side, the passport gates opened and the two fellows switched sides. It was usually a pretty quiet affair. But once a bratwurst stand owner was arrested. He tried to run but they got him. He worked for the West. Agents scrawled messages on sausage wrappers and the kiosk owner passed on those wrappers around bratwursts to the next agent. Once, a couple guys, both drunk, tried to muscle through the passport gates to the trains to the West but they never made it. The guards were everywhere so mostly life was routine, quiet.”
Was she here in the 1930s when 10,000 Jewish children were evacuated from this station to London? “I was only 7 or 8 when that happened. My best friend, Sarah Goldschmidt, was a little Jewish girl who lived near us, just 3 blocks from here. We went to the same school and I was always at her house. Her mother, Mrs. Goldschmidt, was a wonderful baker. I remember eating loaves of her chocolate babka. She always sent a big hunk of it with me as a gift for my mother. One day Sarah was here, the next day she was gone. The family disappeared, too. Their shoe shop closed. My mother told me never to talk of it, never to mention my friendship with Sarah to anyone. I didn’t but I never forgot her. I found out after the war, Sarah had survived but her family had perished in Auschwitz. That was life—and death—with the Nazis. Worse than the Soviets.” I glanced at my watch and knew I had to get to my train. I bought some flowers, thanked her for her time and walked to my platform.
The Gothic like ceiling vaulted above me, light poured in through the glass walls, trains screeched and passengers bustled. Odd, how a place that looked so normal now, so routine, not so long ago had been a dangerous international border crossing, occupied by a hostile foreign government, the stage of such misery, confusion, heartbreak and death. I boarded my train for Hamburg and we glided out of the station into the sunlight, apartment blocks and monuments flashing past.
In 1990, just a few weeks after the Berlin Wall had fallen, I brought my wife and 3 kids and the Nuzzo family to Berlin. On a warm summer’s morning, the nine of us boarded a subway that would, for the first time in decades, be allowed to travel from the Zoo Station in the West, to the Friedrich Street Station in the East, stopping at all the old ghost stations. The cars were filled with revelers celebrating the moment with beers and tears. 10 minutes after leaving the West we arrived at the Friedrich, the station still dilapidated from years of neglect, looking as it had in 1968. It was still rusty, dark and grimy with soot from old coal powered engines. But the atmosphere was markedly different. Instead of the drab, morose residents I’d seen years before, stood crowds, smiling and waving the black, gold and red flag of Germany. The old lines were open and the city was nudged toward unification with the West.
Friedrich Station is a jigsaw puzzle of historic moments, many ragged, ill-shaped, some thrilling and some desperate, but all fit into each other in some rough pattern, forming a picture of the of the city. With the puzzle part of Frau Rosen’s Flower Shop, I had begun to put the pieces together.