Where Do We Begin?

So where do we begin? Well, at the beginning, of course.

Greta Steiner was born Alexandra Maria Fedorova in 1985 in Berlin, Germany.  She is the daughter of Colonel Yuri Alexis Fedorova and his wife Angelina Tatiana Fedorova.  She has an older sister Charlotte Angelina Fedorova born in 1983.

Her father was a colonel in the Stasi, the East German Secret Police, and her family lived in a pleasant apartment block with a number of other officers and their families. The building had a park, a childcare center, and a kindergarten where her mother worked as a teacher. She had started accompanying her mother to work when she was two and had become an old hand at the playground by the time she was four. Since her father was a senior secret police officer, she was deferred to and spoiled, although not as much as some of the other officer’s children.

In 1989, when Greta was four, the Stasi was at the peak of its power and employed hundreds of thousands of people, both openly and covertly, but the solidarity of the Soviet Block was splintering and during the summer of 1989 Hungary and Czechoslovakia had both opened their borders and thousands of East Germans had fled to the west. The Stasi had looked to the government for leadership but the politicians had debated and dithered and decided nothing.  In November crowds of people had swarmed onto the Berlin wall from both sides and started ripping it down.  Greta’s mother and father had talked quietly about this and the increasing violence against members of the Stasi’s employees and the start of official denunciations of individual members of the force itself.  Finally, her father had said they would need to go somewhere, or he would need to find some other way to save them since the citizens were starting to rebel and demand blood for previous Stasi abuses.

About a week after the wall came down, Greta’s mother had sent her home early from the childcare center since she had a cough.  Greta was curled up in the big chair under a blanket napping when her father came home early. He had taken a bottle of vodka out of the cupboard and poured a water glass full and then gone out on the balcony and looked across the city and started sipping. Finally, he threw down the rest of the glass of vodka in one swallow and took off his great coat and put it on a chair then unbuckled his revolver and dropped it on the balcony. He scooted a chair up to the railing and stepped up on it.

Greta ran to the patio door and yelled the first thing that came into her head, “Daddy, you need to put up your gun. Momma will be angry if you leave it lying around. I’m cold and sick and mommy sent me home early. Will you give me a cuddle and some tea, please?”

Her father had looked down at her and then out at the city, which was getting wilder and more dangerous every day as the old society crumbled. Then, he stepped down off the chair and retrieved his pistol and picked her up.

“You are right, Princess. “I need to put my gun away, probably for good. Now, let’s go and sit in the big chair and I will make you tea with honey and you can sit on my lap under a blanket and I will read to you about the frog in the deep well and how he got out. How would you like to move? I think I can get a job in Russia on the police force in St. Petersburg. I have a cousin there that is a captain in the civil police. If a frog can get out of a well, a colonel should be able to get out of a very sticky situation.”

The next day her father had come home with travel permits and Russian papers for all of them that his cousin the captain in the Saint Petersburg police had supplied. They had packed and moved to Russia and her father had joined the civil police as a detective.