Ilse’s nocturnal permits to visit her studio in Geri and Eva’s house were eventually replaced by day passes, and then, as restrictions on Germans were eased, she was allowed to return home.
Well, not home, because Chaplain Sellars was still occupying my grandmother’s house, now with another US army chaplain. Home had to be at Geri and Eva’s, next door, where she lived for over a year, until early 1947, when Monika returned with her husband and their young daughter from Westphalia, to where they had fled as the endgame approached in Berlin.
There had been a buzz between Ilse and Sellars from the moment they met. Though Sellars knew that he wasn’t allowed to give back my grandmother’s furniture, one night he whispered to Ilse from across the garden fence that he wouldn’t object if she removed everything from the garage. Anyway, she could always pay him in Nazi flags if necessary; then the transfer would be a sale, not a restitution. Or, better still, she could replace the furniture with old beds and chests of drawers that she might find elsewhere, so that it wouldn’t look as if hers had been returned. With the Marlboros she’d earned, she could buy a lot of used furniture.
Ilse’s friendship with Sellars deepened. They couldn’t be seen going in and out of each other’s houses, but they could simultaneously have dinner in their adjoining gardens. He shared things with her that she couldn’t find on the black market – things like canned spam and whisky. She cooked with his ingredients and passed the dishes back across the fence. And Sellars was very kind to her son, whose father, Harald Böhmelt, had broken up with Ilse after she’d refused to marry him, and now lived in another German city. Sellars took the boy on excursions to nearby lakes in the Americans’ big military vehicles and to parties for the GIs’ kids. Most importantly, he got Ilse fresh commissions to photograph the troops.
It was more work than she could manage, at least with the equipment she’d rescued from her atelier in the Budapesterstrasse. She had left the best behind; it was too heavy to carry and hopefully it would be too heavy for the city’s looters. So Ilse did what few Germans could have done: she convinced Sellars to take the risk of persuading some GIs to fetch for her whatever they could load onto a US Army truck.
Soon her surviving cameras and dark-room tools were set up in Geri and Eva’s house. Sellars also put her in touch with the buyers at one of the special shops for American soldiers – the so-called ‘PX shops’. It was a privilege for a German to supply one of those shops. You didn’t only get an income and the occasional goodie; you were also recognized as an insider. And this earned you the trust to be allowed to move more freely around the city. As well as a little envy from less fortunate Germans.
One of them, whom I met in Zehlendorf in 2006, remembered Ilse from those far-off days. ‘Ilse was smarter than the rest of us. She looked better-fed. She was a Big Fish. She had contacts with the Americans. High-up ones.’
‘How did you know about her contacts with the Americans?’ I asked her, as we sat drinking tea, almost exactly sixty years later.
‘I worked as a cashier in the PX shop where she used to bring her stuff to sell,’ the woman replied. ‘The quality of the things she brought for the GIs kept getting better. You could tell that she was popular – with both her sellers and her buyers. She seemed particularly well in with one American, a priest.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yes, one evening as I was walking home after work, I passed a house and saw Ilse standing by the front door, chatting with a pastor with a dog collar. This woman looks so much more relaxed and healthy than the rest of us, I thought. Then I said to myself: But that’s the same woman who sells things to our shop. This must be her house. Or else the priest is her boyfriend!’
By 1955, the house was no longer pink, nor did the inside look like a dilapidated bordello. The American Army paid for it to be redecorated before finally returning it to my family, a decade after Chaplain Sellars had moved in.