His wife

>"always be ready"<

Her tone suddenly does seem angry to me, though apparently also at the Soviet Union. But her tone doesn't make any sense in combination with her words and I still don't get what she means with a 'gulag'. Clearly she must have been through a lot before even coming here but what could it be?

Before I can question any of this, guards take those women to their work and I must goto the train station before I miss my train.

_
As I sit down in the train and look out of the window as if I was searching, longing for something, I realize that I in fact am utterly privileged to flee.

Far too many others will meet their end in Auschwitz and I just leave despite what my responsibility is. If my life depended on this mission, I don't think I'd be brave enough to sneack away. If I was more patriotic, I wouldn't dare to run off. But here I am on my way out.

Is it selfish to run away as if it was the simplest thing? Don't I have a moral duty as someone who knows the truth? Could I really find peace after what I've seen, after the screams I heard and after the horror I know?

Am I silly to even doubt this?

It's not like anyone could blame me for my choice to leave. Everyone would want it, everyone who at least seeks to have peace and freedom. So no one could blame me, certainly not those at home. They arranged a marriage for me, forced me into the limelight, forced me to become a spy and threw me into hell.

Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if Stalin knew most of what happens at those camps. Maybe even my father did too. And maybe this one guard was right, Nabokov gave his daugther away for power. He willingly said his goodbye before I got here and he knew I wouldn't come back the same, he knew there wasn't a choice for me.
Shouldn't a father want to protect his underage daugther?

But what can I say? I wasn't even able to protect my faith either.
_

When I had arrived in Berlin, all I did was to check into the same hotel as I was in once before which made me get a bit nostalgic.

The following day on the 20th of July I already searched for this Cafe to make sure that I find the correct one and the area it's in made me a bit sad. It was filles with beautiful buildings, though those swastika flags just ruin the peace that street has.

On my way to the Cafe, I passed the church I used to go to and it hurt in my soul. By now I accepted to have fallen from faith but I regret deeply that I lost a part of myself in the process.

Though I tried to distract myself with the fact that I'll regain myself again once I'm finally freeded from the handcuffs of pain that were enforced on me. During this thought process, the radios in the streets suddenly released a message that made me stop in the middle of the pavement.
"Hitler is dead."

Others were crying while some soldiers put handcuffs on SS-men while I just couldn't react. There was no sadness of course but a strange sense of euphoria. In my mind that meant that Germany would pull out of the war, that Nazis would be punished and concentration camps would be banned forever.

But some hours later, Hitler gave a speech in the radio announcing that he is well, that the plot committed by traitors failed. Meanwhile the thought came to my mind that those are not the first traitors I've heard about. Which means that there are Germans very willing to fight this regime, to prove that they are different.

But I never heard about traitors in the Soviet Union, maybe they don't talk about them on the news. Or aren't we willing to fight for our freedom.

21st of July 1944

Berlin, Nazi-Germany

In his letter Vasily never mentioned a time, so I got up early and went to the cafe the moment the opened at 7am in the morning.