Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  I put my finger to my lips and pointed to the sign DANGER: SHHHH: THE ENEMY IS LISTENING, under which was another sign prohibiting smoking. He read the signs, grinned at me, and pointed his cigarette toward the right wing.

  “Follow me.” He had a pleasant face and looked somewhat younger than my mother, who was forty-five.

  I bowed slightly, said, “Thank you,” and followed him to the right prong of the Y and up one flight. The Bach toccata and the garlic trailed us, Bach growing fainter as we walked down the long, warm hallway, which was generous and dark, with storage cabinets on one side, laboratories on the other. The smells emanating from those laboratories were strong but not necessarily unpleasant.

  The man in the white lab coat stopped halfway down the corridor at a laboratory marked RARE EARTHS. “Stairs at the end of the hall to the penthouse. Chief’s office.” He pointed with his cigarette.

  A penthouse off the second floor? I bowed again. “I thank you. Herr Doktor.”

  “You are quite welcome,” and he disappeared through the door of Rare Earths.

  The lobby on first and the corridor on second were spartan. By comparison, the penthouse up the spiral staircase from the right wing was rich, with Oriental carpets, leather couch and chairs, and oil paintings of landscapes. There was no portrait of Adolf Hitler there, either, only the landscapes and charts of insects and an atomic table.

  I thought it must be Sonja Press at the desk taking dictation from the Director, Professor Avilov, who was pacing back and forth. She was an attractive brunette of twenty or so, with a tiny figure, not at all boyish, but quite round. He was as I remembered him when he visited high school to lecture to my biology class: stocky, not too tall, with thick light-brown hair and powerful arms and chest. His son, Mitzka Avilov, who had been my schoolmate and friend, told me that his father had been a swimming champion in his youth. Professor Avilov was a world-famous geneticist, and that is why he was invited, two or three times a year, to speak to the students at my high school.

  When he lectured to us, the first thing he did was push aside the desk with the lectern. He began in French. “Excusez-moi, messieurs . . . dames.” Although my high school was in midtown Berlin, every course except German language and literature was taught in French, even Latin and Greek. He paced, as he did now, hands behind his back, bent forward slightly, but always looking at us, as he now looked at his secretary. He talked to us without notes, partly in German so we could be sure to understand, about his genetic research at the Institute with the fruit fly, Drosophila, and about the little atom smasher—a linear accelerator—they had built themselves. It produced fast neutrons and artificial radioactive substances, producing a wide spectrum of ionizing radiation which induced a great number of gene and chromosome mutations in the irradiated Drosophila. They could then analyze this information and form hypotheses about the mechanism of actions of genes. His lectures were always marvelous, and even though he was one hundred percent Russian, his French and German were faultless, except for a deep Russian voicing of the sibilants. He said “voize” instead of “voice”; his was low and soft. Russian.

  When he finished dictating, Professor Avilov turned to me and said, “You are one hour and seven minutes late! Come along!” And said to his secretary. “I will be gone less than fifteen minutes.” Then he ran down the spiral staircase to the second floor, I tripping after him, rucksack and all, with the stench of the salami for Uncle and Aunt wafting after us. He talked to me as we moved. “This whole wing is devoted to genetics. We work only with insects and other animals, mostly Drosophila.” He stopped for an instant and turned to me. “Do you understand?” Running along once more, he continued, “The teacher of mathematics tells me you are the only one in the class who understands. Is that true? Eh?”

  What can one say to such a question? My face grew warm with embarrassment.

  “Come! We’ll see if they can take you in Physics.” We stopped in the laboratory at the farthest end of the Genetics wing.

  It was a junkyard, the Physics Laboratory, the center table a junk shop, the floor a scrap heap. Total disorder. A man of middle age—older than my mother, fifty or so—impeccably dressed in a suit with vest, sat on a high stool at the table, peering through his glasses at two pieces of rusty metal which he seemed to be trying to fit together. The lab was huge, and one could see other, smaller laboratories opening from the central scrapyard.

  “Herr Professor Kreutzer, could you use a helper?”

  Herr Professor did not even look up but waved us away with the rusty iron.

  “Come along. We’ll try Chemistry.” And Professor Avilov was off, racing down the hallway.

  The Chemistry Laboratory was a busy place, but orderly, a long room with a center table running its length, on which flasks bubbled and tubes carried liquid here and there. The smells were overwhelming, and some were new to me. An older man with totally gray hair and two young women tended operations.

  “My dear Grand Duke,” said Professor Avilov, “do you need a helper?”

  The Grand Duke spoke with a strong Russian accent. “Tell me, Nikolai Alexandrovich, has he ever taken a course in qualitative analysis?”

  Everyone looked at me: the Grand Duke Chemist, the two girls. Professor Avilov. I shook my head. My face burned.

  “Well, then, has he ever worked in a chemistry laboratory?”

  I shook my head again, and they all laughed at me. One girl sat on a stool with her legs spread apart; her skirt was quite short. The Grand Duke shrugged and said, “Such help we are not in need of at present.”

  Professor Avilov walked quickly; I followed. At this point I could again hear the Bach floating up the stairwell. Quite obviously. Herr Director Professor Dr Nikolai Alexandrovich Avilov had failed to tell anyone of my coming; most probably, he himself forgot. It was not surprising. My situation was hopeless. And even Goebbel’s School Proclamation, which I had seen the previous morning on the way to high school on the S-Bahn, was no great shock to me. After all, I was born in 1926, and most of my life had been lived in the lunatic asylum of the Third Reich.

  As always on school mornings, I caught the 7:09 originating in Zehlendorf, so I could get a seat. A man across from me was reading Der Angriff, a Nazi Party daily for the workingman. I scanned the front page and saw the Proclamation in the lower right-hand corner. I changed seats to get a look at another daily. Die Morgenpost, and found it there too:

  We have received innumerable protests from teachers and the Hitler Youth who will no longer attend classes where the contamination of Jewish presence is being tolerated. In response to this overwhelming protest, and in order to ensure the superior education of the German youth,

  IT IS HEREBY ORDERED AND DECREED THAT, as of April 15, 1943, no one with Jew’s blood in his blood vessels is allowed to set foot in a German school.

  Dr Josef Goebbels

  Minister for People’s

  Enlightenment and

  Propaganda

  Gauleiter Berlin

  My first reaction was to look around at the other passengers and wonder if they could tell by my curly dark hair, my dark eyes—and my nose—that I would no longer be able to go to school. My second reaction was relief: I hated it! Two years before, the math professor had taken me as far as he could in mathematics. All my friends were gone—Sheereen, Petter, Mitzka Avilov. And I had always a bad conscience about school because I never did the homework.

  The train was racing into the station. The acceleration and deceleration was very fast and smooth—electric. The seats would fill up here and by the next stop, Steglitz, the aisles would be jammed. I opened a schoolbook and pretended to study so some adult would not force me to stand. There was no sense even showing up at school, and I did not want to go home until I was certain Father had left for his office. He caught Trolley No. 177 at 9:45. Mother had taken the 6:49 train to her potatoes. So! I had over two hours to kill.

  The 7:09 pulled into Potsdamer Platz at 7:25. Most of the southeast and
southwest suburban trains converged there and were underground; I had to climb up the stairs to get to the regular railroad station, Potsdamer Bahnhof. It was a busy place with waiting rooms, kiosks, restaurants, ticket and information booths, and racks and racks of timetables for all the German railroads. I liked timetables and, when I was a young boy of six or so, had the fantasy that I would be like my grandfather—my father’s father—who had been the schedule-maker for all the German international trains.

  One of the few times he came to Berlin to visit, he had been very kind and taught me all the intricacies of reading the complicated tables: the different printing, regular and italicized; the numbers, in bold and light, and other symbols. Everything had some kind of meaning.

  I studied the racks for quite some time to figure out a difficult problem to pose to the Potsdamer Bahnhof information clerk, one with a line change to a local line and then to a narrow gauge and then to a bus. To make it more interesting and complicated, that time of year—April—both the winter and the summer schedules were hung. The information clerk had memorized every train of the German Railroad network: the stops, the times, the connections. He was famous for this and was written up, now and then, in the newspapers. Mitzka, Petter, and I used to visit him every month or two, and not once did we catch him out. He got tired of our game and, sometimes, would not cooperate, so I was hoping that he would not remember me.

  He sat behind the information window at a desk loaded with timetables, a normal-looking man, wearing a railroad uniform, dark, with gold buttons. I was third in line. While waiting for my turn, I rehearsed what I would say to him.

  “Good morning. I beg your pardon. I have to go from Berlin-Gartenfeld to Stäffelstein.”

  “What day and what time do you have to be in Stäffelstein?”

  “The second Tuesday in June, in the afternoon, or very early Wednesday.”

  “The second Tuesday is June eighth,” he said without consulting a calendar. “May I see your ticket?”

  “My father hasn’t bought it yet.”

  He hesitated. Perhaps he recognized me. “All right,” he said, finally. “You have to leave Gartenfeld on Tuesday, June eighth, at six fourteen a.m., then catch the six fifty-one train at Potsdamer Bahnhof to Nuremberg; this is an accelerated train so you have to have a surcharge ticket. It will arrive at three thirteen p.m. at Naila, and at three forty-five p.m. you have to leave on the narrow-gauge side with a train going to Kronach-Süd, which arrives at four thirty p.m. It is the third stop. There will be a bus waiting, departing at four-fifty p.m. to take passengers along the Main. Fifth stop, Stäffelstein, at six thirty-seven p.m.” All this, of course, was without consulting a timetable. “Do you want me to write that down?”

  “No, thank you. I looked it up myself already. I just wanted to make sure. You are very correct.”

  “Why not?”

  After that I spent some time at the kiosks looking at the erotica in the magazines and trying not to see the repulsive pornography in the lower-class Nazi newspapers. One could not help but notice the Stürmer posters on the station walls: Schmul Salomon Jew Bloodsucker caught in the act. Pictured was an old man, watery eyed, hook nosed, demonically grinning, bloody knife in hand, in the act of raping a beautiful blond child. His supposedly huge and distorted sex organ was masked by a blob of blood. Or there was the poster that showed a caricature of an old Jew committing incest with his own children. The caption read: And he blames the 5.5.

  In my heart, I thought my curly hair and my face the essence of the caricature, and that everyone around me could see it in an instant.

  I hopped on a train to the next main station, Friedrichstrasse, where I went through a similar timetable routine, except that the man behind the information booth at that station had to look everything up, and it took him a very long time. The most frightening poster of all was hung in the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse. It was an actual photograph of a United States embassy with an endless line of Jews standing before the closed iron gate. The caption read: No one wants them. It was true, of course.

  I timed it to arrive back at our house at exactly ten, and had a rare day to myself at home.

  Our shelty, Dritt, met me at the door, tail-wagging and smiling. “Well, Dritt, my little friend, are you hungry, eh? If you’ll be a good boy and help me pick up some twigs for the fire, I’ll go and get some delicious, semi-rotten, stinking meat for you and your friend Mies.” Mies was our cat.

  I went into the basement, picked up a large canvas, and Dritt and I went out into the garden—which was relatively large with many trees—and filled the canvas with twigs and branches. Mies jumped out of the bushes and followed us around, and the pigeons came, too. I let them all back into the house with me. The pigeon coop was in the basement, but they liked to fly around the house when Mother wasn’t there. Then we all went into the music room.

  In the music room were a Bechstein grand piano, my father’s two cellos, my violin—which I refused to play after I was dropped from our high school rowing team when I was twelve—a record player, a radio, a couch, and some chairs. It was forbidden by law to listen to shortwave, and I was not permitted to play records at full volume when my parents were at home. I searched through the collection and decided on the Brandenburgs—good music to work by—and put the volume as loud as it would go. Then we all went into the kitchen and deposited some of the wood in the bin and down to the basement to prepare the old wood stove in the laundry room to cook Dritt’s meat, which I would have to get in Steglitz.

  Then I began to change all the tubs of water in the entire house. Every available vessel was filled with water or sand against incendiaries—washbasins, bathtubs, pots. Also, in case of a break in the service, we needed a secure supply of water for drinking, washing, and cooking. The water had to be emptied every so often and then refilled. Bach, Dritt, Mies, and the pigeons followed me about the house. It took quite some time, and I had to race into the music room rather often to change the record.

  After that, we went into my room, which was on the third floor, and got the antenna wire I kept hidden behind my books. I climbed through the trap to the attic, fastened an end as high as I could to the eaves, unrolled and trailed it down to the music room, which was on the first floor, and attached it to the radio. I searched the 16- and 19-meter bands and, finally, got something which sounded like news originating from a radio station not controlled by Goebbels. And, indeed, after a few minutes, there came the announcement, “This is London calling.” It was BBC German-language broadcast:

  Allies hold their own in the Pacific but with heavy losses. Heavy Allied losses to German submarines in the Atlantic. The German Army reorganizes in the mud in Russia after a huge winter defeat. Mass graves of more than four thousand Polish officers found in Katyn; there is some discussion as to whether or not this massacre occurred before the German invasion, and the Soviet Union breaks off diplomatic relations with the exiled government of Poland in London. The British Eighth Army in Africa continues successful offensive . . .

  I detached the antenna from the radio, rolled it up as I ran up the stairs, detached it from the eaves in the attic, and hid it, once again, in my room.

  After that, I went into my father’s study and, with a hairpin, unlocked his bookcase. I could open any lock in the house. He kept law and sexology books in there—marriage manuals or so—but the most interesting was Fuchs’s Moral and Custom History of Imperial Germany Before and During World War I. It was all about sexual misbehavior. There were also old textbooks, collector’s items, such as a nineteenth-century gynecology.

  When I was through reading, I put Mies out, set the pigeons in their coop in the basement, said good-bye to Dritt, and took the trolley, No. 177, rather than the S-Bahn, to Steglitz, an adjacent suburb, because the trolley stop was only two blocks from the pet shop, where I would stand in line for two or three hours to get the rotten, smelly meat. I timed it so that I would arrive home after my parents did. And, of course, the first thing was fo
r Mother and me to put the meat to cook in the laundry room in the basement—with all the windows open against the smell. Mother was always quite grateful for whatever I did around the house. It had been several years since our maids left—Jews were not permitted to hire Aryans—and my father, although he tried now and then to help, just didn’t know how. Once the meat was simmering in the laundry room. Mother told me that my father was waiting to see me in his study.

  He sat, as usual, on his thronelike tapestry chair, wrapped in blankets, a green corduroy dressing gown over his suit. Berlin is cold, and there was no heat in our house by April 1943, except in the kitchen from the stove. His spectacles dangled, as always, by one loop from an ear, and he held a sheaf of legal papers. On his lap lay Dritt, who was actually my father’s dog, a gift of gratitude from the Crown Prince of Imperial Germany, whom my father’s criminal law firm had extricated from some kind of trouble with a woman. Along with the shelty came an autographed photo portrait of the Prince sitting on the lawn, looking thoughtful. The photograph was subscripted Wilhelm der Dritte. Of course, he never actually became Wilhelm the Third, and my father had to keep the picture hidden in a drawer. Mother stood beside Father in her gray shawl and black suit, her hand resting on the back of his chair, a classic pose, ready for the photographer, and I knew there was to be a pronouncement.

  “You are aware, Josef, that because of your background the authorities will not permit you to complete high school.”

  My background! My father, like all lawyers, had learned to obfuscate. He always spoke of it euphemistically as my “background.” Our eyes met, but I said nothing. It would do no good. I was never permitted any choice about my life.