Page 107 of The Secret Midwife of Berlin

As the soldier guided her towards the water, Clara looked back one last time. Hugo and André had already melted back into the crowd, two more shadows in a landscape of shadows. Even her farewells had become casualties of this war – rushed, incomplete, carrying all the things left unsaid.

The sea was black and cold, the spray sharp against her face as the small boat rose and fell in the waves. Around her, the wounded groaned softly, their eyes fixed on the faint line of the horizon ahead. Clara kept herself busy, checking on the wounded, offering sips of water, talking quietly to them about who was waiting in England for them, soothing, reassuring words – for her own comfort as much as theirs.

Finally, through the sea mist, the faint outline of the white cliffs rose like ghosts from the water. A murmur rippled through the men in a mix of disbelief and relief.

England – the place she once called home was looming ahead of her. She didn’t know what to call it anymore, but she was too relieved to see the shoreline to think about it.

The wind off the Channel caught her hair, as she stepped off the boat and onto English soil. She paused, looking back at the sea with her hand pressed to her stomach, feeling the life growing there and whispered a prayer for all those she had left behind in the shattered landscape of the French coastline and the persecuted neighbourhoods of Berlin.

1944

Clara Bergmann arrived safely in England in June 1940 via the Dunkirk evacuation, rescued by one of the Little Ships that ferried soldiers and civilians from the beaches to larger ships and back across the Channel.

That November, she gave birth to a son. She named him Frederick, after the man who had once traced her heart with his fingertips and sworn he would find her again.

Friedrich Bergmann never reached England. Four years later, on 20 July 1944, he took part in the failed assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. When the plot collapsed, he was arrested at Bendlerblock, condemned by the People’s Court and executed on 8 August 1944.

Clara learned of his death through Red Cross channels a month later. By then, she was working as a midwife in a clinic on the south coast, her days filled with the cries of newborn babies and voices of women who had also fled the war in Europe.

Her son grew up knowing that his mother had risked everything to save lives in wartime Berlin and that his father had died a hero of the German resistance.

Sometimes, on clear evenings, Clara would walk along the beach with Frederick running on ahead, his laughter carrying on the breeze. She would pause and turn towards the sea, closing her eyes and whispering Friedrich’s name. She would think of how he had refused to look away when others did, how he had stood against his beloved country when he saw what it was doing to its own people. He had chosen to act, knowing what it would cost. All those men who fought for borders and pride had achieved nothing but suffering. In the end, it wasn’t nations that mattered, but humanity itself. Courage to show kindness. Strength to show defiance. Love to show people could still be good.

Friedrich had been all those things. And now, at last, Clara understood that she was too.

She opened her eyes and looked down at her hands. The same hands that had secretly delivered babies in Berlin and freely on the shores of England, that had held Friedrich’s face and buttoned their son’s coat each morning. British hands. German hands. A midwife’s hands.

They were simply hers and that was enough.