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THE BERLIN FLOWER SHOP by Mike Ross
The Berlin Flower Shop by Mike Ross
“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’m talking with Frau Rosen in Rosen’s Floral Shop inside the Friedrich Street Train Station in central Berlin, Germany.
This unlovely structure in the center of the city is unlike any other. It has a soul, a heart, a living presence. The streams of humanity flowing through it for 150 years gives it life. If you stand in the middle and close your eyes you can feel the vibrations of the past, and the relief of the present. You hear the screeching trains from the 1880s to the 2000s, smell the ever present simmering bratwursts, the tang of coffee and the woody aroma of the bookstalls. This is the here and now, this is the wave and thunder of life as it sweeps over a great city, this place is the “now”, no matter when that “now” is or was, past, present, future in the same instant. Open your eyes and the soaring cantilevered roof spreads for acres up and down the tracks, sunlight streams through the glass walls.
I have a couple of hours between trains and wander into the floral shop to get a closer look at a black and white photo in the display window. The photo shows 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 is filled with customers and the front door stands open. Under the photo is written, ‘1887’. Frau Rosen, seeing my interest, comes over to explain the picture.
“That’s my grandfather,” she points 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 15 or 16 when he left for the Russian front.” She pauses, glances at the photo and back to me. “He never came back so I took over the shop.” She says this as a matter of fact, just routine for a girl in her mid teens to take on running a family store. She tells me about the bombs, Hitler’s suicide and the Russian occupation.
She is now in her mid 90s, small and smartly dressed. “And I’m still here”. I congratulate her on her success but she waves 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 ask her why.
“The Russians. This part of the 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, oh, the bombing was worse. I was one of the lucky ones. I survived both.”
Her two young employees wait on the constant stream of customers, the bell above the door tinkling each time it opens. I apologize for taking her time but she only smiles. I ask her what the Friedrich Street Station was like during the years of Soviet occupation and the now vanished German Democratic Republic, known in America as East Germany.
“The Soviet years were a quiet nightmare,” she says, “with so many soldiers and the harsh regulations. The Russians left sometime in the 1950s, I think. In 1961 the East German government divided the station and set up barriers to stop us from fleeing to the West. This station became the main border crossing between East and West Berlin. I was in the East but the other end of this building,” she points, “was sort of in the West, or at least it was used by Westerners to change trains.”
All of Friedrich Station was in the East but the zigzagged routes of two subway lines that served West Berlin converged here. The few stops of those lines that were in the East were bricked up by the government. The Berliners called the stops Ghost Stations, where no one could get on or off except ghosts. Westerners passed through the Friedrich Station but couldn’t leave the building.
She sighs and shakes her head. “When we looked over the barriers, we could see the Westerners getting on and off their trains, well dressed, well fed, reading real newspapers, but we weren’t allowed over to that side, nor they over here. So all we did was watch.” She stops to answer a question and turns back to me.
“Life on this side was hard. Not much food and what we had was terrible. 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 thought back to the late 1960s, when I changed subway lines at the Friedrich Station. While I waited for my connection, I peered over the barricades and passport booths into the East. The place was grimy and smelled of urine, the windows thick with dust. When I returned 22 years later in the summer of 1990, just weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down, the station was much the same but the atmosphere had undergone a sea change. I walked down the platform from what had been the West into the former East, past barriers I would have been shot at just 6 months earlier had I tried to flee, past the relics and detritus of collapsed passport booths. East Germany had died, a piece of trash on the dustbin of history, a ghost in the station among a carnival of other ghosts.
I ask her if she had ever read the spy novels like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre that had made Friedrich Street Station famous. Yes, she had, but the intrigue in those books was exaggerated.
“I remember spies being exchanged. Soldiers marched a guy in and stood at the barricades. Another guy between soldiers was on the other side. The passport gates opened and the two fellows switched. It was usually a pretty quiet affair. Once a guy who owned a bratwurst kiosk,” she points to a spot where a coffee shop stands, “was arrested. He tried to run but they got him. He worked for the West, passed messages somehow. I don’t recall anyone making it across. The guards were everywhere so life was routine, quiet.”
Was she here in the 1930s when 10,000 Jewish children were evacuated through Friedrich Station to London? “I was only 7 or 8 when that happened.” she says. “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, Anna, 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.” Frau Rosen stares out the window a long moment before she continues.
“I found out after the war, Sarah had survived but her family perished in Auschwitz. That was life—and death—with the Nazis. Worse than the Soviets.” I glance at my watch and know I have to get to my train. I buy some flowers, thank her for her time and walk toward my platform.
In 1990 the Berlin Wall fell and the station began its long escape from the cold war. In June of that year, I was on the first train from the West to the East that stopped at the ghost stations. Tearful Berliners crowded the platforms, holding balloons and wearing party hats. They boarded the train and sang songs of freedom, of relief, sang to their beloved Friedrich Street Station.
I walk to platform 9 for my train to Hamburg. The Gothic-like ceiling vaults above me, light pours in through the glass walls, trains screech and
passengers bustle. With eyes closed, I sense the vibrations of the past, hear the bombs falling, the jack boots of Soviet soldiers, the silent scream of a long dead regime realizing it’s a corpse, the joy in the voices at the ghost stations when the springtime of freedom dawns, the relief of the new era. My train rushes in, stirring the smell of bratwurst and coffee with the aroma of the past and the sounds of the present.
