Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  A little later, the rubber director announced, ‘There’s something I must tell you. This isn’t easy for me, so I will keep it short.’ With bowed head and tears in his eyes, he said he was afraid he must disappoint me: he was no longer capable of any kind of sexual relationship. I tried to react in a neutral, friendly manner, but I was overcome by such relief and jubilation that I couldn’t sit still, and fled to the toilet.

  It was the most sublime and edifying visit to the toilet of my life. I conjured up in my mind Friday evening prayers as I had so often heard them in the Old Synagogue, of course in an abbreviated version. I call on you, dear choirboys, to sing, I thought, and made them sing as I remembered it. Everything served to thank God for saving me from deadly danger.

  I do not know, of course, just what Galecki really suffered from at the time, but I believed he was syphilitic, and if I had been obliged to share his bed I would indeed have felt myself to be in mortal danger. Once I knew that matters would not come to that, I felt deeply relieved, as if I had been set free. Hashem li welau iro – God is with me, I fear nothing, I recited silently before I returned to Galecki.

  The rubber director’s hut would really have been an ideal hiding place for me, if only the man hadn’t been such an incorrigible Nazi.

  * Translator’s note: Marienburg – a masterpiece of Gothic architecture now located in Malbork, in northern Poland.

  ONE

  I was to learn to assert myself

  Childhood and Youth in Berlin

  1

  My parents had been married for eleven years when I was born on 4 April 1922. I was their first and only child, and my mother’s late pregnancy was a great surprise to them both.

  Hermann and Betti Jalowicz had both grown up in the Mitte district of Berlin, but in very different circumstances. My grandfather Bernhard Jalowicz dealt in job lots of cheap goods, a business based in Alte Schönhauser Strasse. He was a heavy drinker and beat his wife. His birth name had been Elijahu Meir Sachs, but after emigrating from Russia he had bought identity papers bearing the name Jalowicz from a widow in Calbe on the River Saale.

  His sons went to school, gained their school-leaving certificates and studied at university. Besides studying law, my father participated in the Zionist sports movement. Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were considered physically degenerate, as a result of the cramped living conditions in ghettos and their pursuit of such traditional Jewish activities as selling their wares from door to door. The Zionist idea was to do away with this stigma, and encourage a new national Jewish frame of mind by means of healthy exercise in the fresh air. From time to time my father was the editor responsible for the supraregional journal of the Jewish gymnastics association.

  My mother Betti was also active in the Bar Kokhba sports club. Her father was a grandson of the famous rabbi Akiva Eger, and thus belonged to the Jewish scholastic aristocracy. The prestige of his family background enabled him to marry into the Russian Jewish Wolkowyski family, who were very rich, and he invested his wife’s substantial dowry in building up a large forwarding agency with offices on Alexanderplatz in Berlin.

  My mother, the youngest of six siblings, had been born in 1885. She was a plump little woman whose intellect, wit and enormous vitality impressed everyone as soon as she opened her mouth. Her unusual combination of dark hair with blue eyes was an attractive feature in her; less attractive were her short, fat legs.

  Hermann and Betti Jalowicz, Marie’s parents, around 1932.

  My father, at that time a good-looking young man with many girls chasing him, got to know Betti Eger for the first time on the telephone. He is said to have told her, ‘I’ve heard so many delightful things about you; I suppose I’m sure to be disappointed when I meet you in person.’ My mother immediately fell for that line; they did meet, and fell in love. In 1911 they were married in my mother’s family home at 44 Rosenthaler Strasse. My Eger grandparents’ large apartment lay opposite the newly built courtyard complex of the Hackesche Höfe in central Berlin.

  In his early years practising as a lawyer, my father had gone into partnership with his colleagues Max Zirker and Julius Heilbrunn, who had their chambers in Alexanderstrasse. He had been to school with Zirker, who had grown stout since those days, but enjoyed social occasions as much as his partner Heilbrunn. Meanwhile, my father sat at his desk attending to the everyday work of the practice.

  Angry resentment gradually built up in Betti Jalowicz. She felt that Zirker and Heilbrunn were unscrupulously exploiting her husband. ‘Let’s build up a practice of our own. We’ll make it,’ she kept telling my father, to encourage him. And a little while before the outbreak of the First World War the two of them did indeed move into their own premises, at 19a Prenzlauer Strasse, a few hundred metres from Alexanderplatz. That address was their living and working space rolled into one.

  My mother devoted herself energetically to this legal practice. She had always been sorry that she couldn’t take a school-leaving examination and embark on further studies herself. When her older brothers were studying jurisprudence, she secretly followed the course that they were taking. As a young woman she had been office manager in her brother Leo’s large legal chambers, where she was not only in charge of all the staff but drafted whole documents herself. From the legal viewpoint, they were often so brilliantly written that nothing in the wording or punctuation of her drafts had to be changed.

  My father was certainly interested in jurisprudence and the philosophy of law, but he hated the daily routine of a lawyer’s life, and was useless as a businessman. He would sometimes leave the room when a client got on his nerves, slamming the door behind him and telling my mother, ‘You go and deal with him; this is your practice.’

  On the other hand, he loved to amuse a large social gathering with accounts of curious incidents from his working life. For instance, he told the tale of the client who, in great agitation, showed him a summons to appear in court on a certain day. ‘Look at that, Dr Jalowicz, look at that!’ he kept saying as he pointed to the date. Only when the client explained that it was Yom Kippur did my father understand the problem. ‘It’s Puderbeutel’s doing!’ the client lamented. Puderbeutel was the name of his adversary in the case concerned, and he was convinced that the villain had meant to hit him where it hurt by ensuring that he would have to offend against the Jewish holy day by appearing in court.

  My father also liked to tell the story of the old Jewish woman who came to see him in order to ask whether a man is supposed to beat his wife. Even as she spoke she was beginning to remove her clothes to show him the evidence of conjugal violence. ‘No, no, don’t do that!’ he had said, horrified.

  His clients also included non-Jewish members of the working class, like the man who came to ask a question; he stammered, but my father made out, with difficulty, that the matter concerned someone whose gold teeth had been removed after he had died in hospital. With care and great tact, he asked which of the man’s loved ones had been so shamefully mistreated. ‘Doesn’t have to be a loved one, does it?’ inquired the man, annoyed. He was a pall-bearer, and wanted to lodge a complaint against the Virchow hospital, which was delivering corpses deprived of their gold teeth to the cemeteries. In the opinion of my father’s client, it was the pall-bearers’ right to supplement their meagre income by robbing the bodies themselves.

  My grandparents on my mother’s side had both died before I was born. After that, my aunt Grete took over the apartment at 44 Rosenthaler Strasse. She gave dinner parties there for the whole family circle on the major Jewish holidays, and every year our unforgettable Seder evenings took place in her huge dining room.

  As far back as I can remember, my great-aunt Doris presided over the company, as the eldest member of the family. She always wore grey silk, with a ribbon round her neck, and the expression on her face reminded me of a bulldog. Doris Schapiro had once been a very rich woman, and had fled from Russia to Berlin before the revolution. Her daughter Sylvia Asarch, who had a similar story
behind her, was always present at these gatherings as well.

  There were not many children in the family – apart from me, only my cousins Kurt-Leo and Hanna-Ruth. That made Uncle Arthur all the more important to us. A very amusing man, and fond of children, Arthur was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions. Even his outward appearance was unusual. The Egers were usually short and either fat or thin, but Arthur towered at least a head above them all. The others had nondescript dark hair; Arthur’s was fiery red. He differed from the rest of the family in mindset as well, being both a communist and a passionately Orthodox Jew. He used to send his sister Grete, with whom he sometimes stayed, nearly crazy with his religious notions and practices. Professionally, Arthur traded in joke and novelty articles. For a while he had a shop in Münzstrasse, later he ran a market stall, but his projects regularly led to bankruptcy.

  A family party at the summer house in Kaulsdorf in March 1932. Top row, from left: Herbert Eger, Sylvia Asarch, Mia Eger, Edith Lewin (a niece from Riga), Betti Jalowicz, Julius Lewin. Bottom row: Kurt-Leo Eger, Margarete (Grete) Eger, Marie Jalowicz. Front: Hanna-Ruth Eger, Hermann Jalowicz.

  On Jewish holidays there was bound to be trouble with him. When everyone else had arrived at Rosenthaler Strasse after the religious service, and were waiting for the festive meal to be served, he invariably arrived last. At the time, family members used to say, ‘Ah, well, Arthur’s closing the shul again,’ referring to the synagogue, and with a punning reference to Schule, school. He always met more acquaintances outside the synagogue and would talk to them for hours.

  Picture postcard of Arthur Eger as a soldier in the First World War, 1915, left in the picture. The postcard reads: ‘How well one could live if one were a millionaire and the war was over – apart from that, we’re in good health. Regards from Arthur.’

  But when, on a Seder evening, he spoke of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, he did so with such deep and serious feeling that he might have been there himself. And every time the standard liturgy continued after the meal, he looked a little paler, and announced with credible alarm, ‘The Seder cannot go on; thieves have broken in and stolen the afikaumon.’ The word meant a special piece of matzo that we children had hidden. If we brought it out, we were rewarded with something sweet – that was the custom.

  Long before I went to school, Arthur tried to teach me the Hebrew alphabet. That, too, was in line with an old Jewish custom. My father used to tell me how, when he was a little boy sitting on his grandfather’s lap, the old man had told him, ‘My boy, now you are three years old, and I don’t want you learning your German alphabet first and then our own sacred letters, but the other way round.’

  However, Arthur’s way of going about my lessons infuriated my mother. The first that he drew for me was , the Hebrew letter H. Arthur told me, ‘Look at that, my child, that’s H, and you say hi. Now repeat it: hi.’

  Of course I showed it proudly to my parents. ‘See that? It’s a hi.’

  ‘Where did you learn such nonsense?’ they said at once. For pronouncing the letter hi instead of hey was an older usage, regarded as outmoded and inelegant, something that they did not want me to learn.

  Arthur was constantly at odds with Aunt Grete. For instance, he liked to drink tea with a great many sugar lumps in it, which she thought wasteful. But whenever she protested, Arthur, adding lump after lump to his cup, quoted a silly advertising slogan claiming that the body needed sugar for nourishment:

  Don’t believe the folk who say that sugar is no good.

  You need sugar every day as an essential food.

  Sometimes he declaimed the rhyme like a small child reciting a verse and then getting stuck; at other times he assumed the manner of a ham actor. My stern, dour Aunt Grete kept begging him to stop it – until even she burst out laughing. By then he would have more than ten lumps of sugar in his tea.

  When I was about ten years old, I saw him sitting at the table a day or so after Pessach, putting a piece of matzo on top of a piece of bread, and repeating over and over again, with a silly giggle, ‘Chometz and matzo’, leavened and unleavened bread. No sensible person would still be eating unleavened bread after the Pessach festival,* but he made a joke out of it. It was then I realised that Arthur was acting a part, only you never knew where his joking ended and he was serious again.

  The apartment in Rosenthaler Strasse was also the scene of many family stories that were told only surreptitiously. One of them was about my aunt Ella, and happened when I was still a small child.

  At the turn of the century she had been sent for a few months to Boldera near Riga, where one of the Wolkowyski family’s country estates lay. She must have been a pretty, amusing young woman then, and it was high time for her to marry. In Riga she met Max Klaczko, and they married soon after that. It was only later that she realised he was a terrible psychopath, always grumbling and finding fault, a man who would make her life hell.

  Ella and Max Klaczko once came to visit in Berlin, bringing their daughter Edit. While Ella was happy to be back in her familiar childhood surroundings in Rosenthaler Strasse, her husband went off on his own to see the city. One evening in the year 1926 he stayed out for a long time. When the family had begun worrying about him, the doorbell rang. A police officer stood there, and told Ella, with the usual set expression of sympathy, ‘It is my sad duty to inform you that your husband has had a fatal accident in crossing the road near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.’

  The story goes that Ella uttered a cry of joy, flung her arms round the policeman and performed such a wild dance with him that he could hardly keep his footing. After that, he had to be paid handsomely to keep his mouth shut – while he kept assuring everyone that he was not corrupt. Even Uncle Arthur, who had been broke all his life, offered, ‘Shall I contribute something? It’s a tidy sum.’

  A few days later, Ella Klaczko could feature as the perfect example of a grieving widow, not just to outward appearance but in her general attitude. And indeed, her situation was wretched; her husband left her his typewriter shop in Riga, and nothing else but debts. All Ella possessed were a few typewriters, with which she opened a typing and translation bureau in her apartment.

  My mother often told me about the delicious things she had eaten when she, too, went to spend a few months on the Boldera estate. Sometimes we went to a Russian delicatessen in Charlottenburg. I always loved to go shopping for these good things. Particularly choice tea came in boxes with gold decoration and a strange inscription. ‘Why is there a back-to-front R here?’ My mother explained that it was a , pronounced ‘ja’, which means yes in German. So I got to know the Russian alphabet.

  We sometimes bought sugared klyukva, cranberries, thickly covered in icing sugar. You nibbled them while drinking tea. Or kil’ki – sprats in oil – and grilled peas, with a slightly smoked flavour. I don’t know whether all these things really tasted so good, or whether I was just enchanted by their exotic aspect. My mother told me how in her own childhood she could tell from the smell in the front hall of the apartment whether visitors from Russia had come. The smell of Russian leather given off by their heavy coats could be picked up even in the stairwell; it evoked that special, intense French perfume Cuir de Russie. She felt those odours were promising – they promised that soon there would be delicatessen to eat. Our relations from Riga also brought us special delicacies from there, for instance kalkun, stuffed turkey. My mother waxed enthusiastic because it reminded her of her childhood, and I liked the taste too.

  Soon after my sixth birthday I began going to elementary school in Heinrich-Roller-Strasse. It was 1928, the time of mass unemployment. Many very poor people lived near the catchment area of this school. All the same, my parents did not want to send me to an exclusive private school. I was to learn the social environment there, along with its Berlin dialect, and learn also to assert myself in those surroundings. At the same time, however, they wanted to limit my contact with that world.

  The first day at school; Marie J
alowicz in 1928, aged six.

  For many years my father took me to school every day. Our morning walk together, and the good conversations we had, strengthened the bond between us. I was collected from school by my nanny, Levin. As soon as I got home I was stripped and washed from head to foot. My clothes were either put in with the laundry or hung up to air, and I wore a fresh set: apparently I had taken on the typical, musty smell of the school.

  I skipped the third year. Even before 1933, my parents had a pressing sense of inner uneasiness, and wanted me to get through my schooling quickly. Like my mother and my aunts before me, I changed to the Sophien-Lyzeum elementary school. The three years that I spent there did not mould my character in any particular way. What impressed me most was the arrest of our mathematics teacher Frau Draeger.* This must have been in 1933; from my desk, I saw her being prevented from entering the classroom. Two men in civilian clothes were standing outside the door. She was white as a sheet. A little later I heard the click of handcuffs. Of course I talked about this incident at home. ‘Ask a few questions inconspicuously,’ said my father, ‘and try to find out who else saw it.’ I did as he said, with the result that I was apparently the only child to have observed the scene.

  2

  My mother was only fifty-three years old when she died, on 30 June 1938, of the cancer from which she had been suffering for a long time.* We spared our non-Jewish friends the dilemma of whether or not to attend a Jewish funeral by intentionally sending out the death announcements too late for them to come.

  We were in a terrible situation. My father was earning almost nothing now, and he had run up debts everywhere. He had not been allowed to practise as a notary since 1933. His permit to run a legal practice was valid until September 1938, on the grounds of a regulation making an exception for Jewish ‘frontline fighters’ in the First World War. But when that date came, his career in the law ended. We had nothing left except for a small pension, and what I could earn by providing schoolchildren with extra coaching.