Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  My colleagues talked about the tool-setters much as schoolchildren speak of their teachers. They were always saying, ‘Ours said …’, or, ‘Ours thinks …’, and positively competed to claim the tool-setter who was friendliest to Jews as their own. Something else that influenced the atmosphere was the fact that there were many extremely pretty girls and young women among us.

  Most of the tool-setters behaved in a correct and friendly way to their charges, but one of them, a man by the name of Prahl, was an exception. He was a repellent psychopath – one of creation’s mistakes, with a kind of steeple head* and a brutish, vacant face that always wore a grin. The problem wasn’t his Nazi cast of mind, it was that he had no real cast of mind at all. He was a perverse character, a sadist. For a short time he had been in charge of first aid in the Siemens works, but he had to be removed from that post because of the delight with which he probed the wounds of injured colleagues – even Aryans. If he had to bandage small cuts and grazes, he did it so tightly that he cut off the circulation of his patient’s blood.

  There was a girl in Prahl’s gang who had warts on her face and a deformed nose that made her look like a witch. He was always calling her names, and if her work didn’t please him he would push her around so roughly that she was bruised all over. But obviously the supervisor of the factory hall had decreed that Jewish women were to be treated decently. Pushing and jostling them was a form of touching, touching could, in its turn, lead to communication and fellow-feeling, and anything of that nature was to be avoided.

  When the factory supervisor heard about the bullying, the girl was moved to a gang with a less vindictive tool-setter, and instead of her a very pretty girl with magnificent breasts joined Prahl’s gang. Her name was Katja, but I thought of her as the chestnut girl: she had beautiful brown eyes, and her hair was the colour of chestnuts just fallen from the tree. Goodness knows what she might have become if she had survived.

  Sometimes, with a file in my hand, I managed to go over and spend a minute with her. Or she would come over to me when her machine had been reset.

  ‘I’ve always managed it with any other guy – so I wanted to see if I could do the same to Prahl,’ she once told me. She went on to tell me, in her heavy Berlin accent, how she had been trying to arouse her tool-setter sexually, adding a wealth of indecorous detail. While he was adjusting her machine, she stood just behind him, breathing down his neck and pressing herself closer to him. The man had to beat a hasty retreat, or his trousers would have burst. Max Schulz went scarlet in the face when I told him this story.

  Ruth Hirsch, Nora Schmilewicz and I worked in the same gang. We soon grew close to each other, because all three of us came from incomplete families, and we had all had sad experiences early in life.

  Ruth Hirsch, with her many freckles and her strawberry-blonde hair, was very pretty and attractively youthful. When she had to do something that entailed moving the lever of her lathe slowly, she would gaze out of the window, daydreaming. ‘I was just thinking how nice it was when we could pick up windfall apples and eat them,’ she told me once, and then immediately apologised, because she saw how my mouth was watering. Unfortunately I couldn’t hide my reactions.

  She came from Memel in Lithuania. Hesitantly and shyly at first, she told us that she was an adopted child. With her twin brother, she had grown up in the care of a married couple who ran a small shoe-shop and had a little house and garden of their own. Her birth mother’s name was Zilla Rostowski, and she used to work as a cook in a prosperous Jewish household. Her master had climbed up to her room one day and got her pregnant, but she couldn’t keep her children; the twins were handed over to the childless Hirsch couple for adoption.

  Ruth was a very simple soul, but that made no difference to our friendship. I liked her quiet, naïve, shy way of telling her stories. Her brother had emigrated, and she herself had moved with her parents to Berlin, where the three of them shared a horrible furnished room. Her adoptive mother had severe heart trouble. When Ruth came home in the evening after ten hours of hard work in the factory, she would begin cleaning the family apartment. She thought nothing of that, and merely accepted it as her fate. All she minded was the way that her father was constantly complaining and finding fault.

  Ruth Hirsch was the best worker in our gang at the factory. She was bright enough to understand the work, and very good at carrying it out, but not intelligent enough to hate it. She often said, ‘How nice it would be if we had normal wages, not the reduced wage for Jews. Then we could train properly and become qualified lathe operators.’

  Her best and happiest time had been when she had a job as a maid with a Jewish husband and wife, both of them doctors. Full of enthusiasm, she told me that once, when her employers went away for some time, they left the whole apartment to her. Ruth kept precise records in an octavo notebook of what she did every day, what she bought when she went shopping, what she ate, and so on. However, she didn’t have enough work, so she decided to surprise the two doctors. Her mistress had said the parquet flooring was getting so dark that its surface would have to be stripped.

  So Ruth set to work on that. She got some metal filings and used them to strip down the surface of the wooden parquet. While she was working on it she ate nothing but dry bread, to save her employers money. When they came home, she had stripped down all the floors in the front rooms, and showed them her touching notebook, where she had entered everything she did in a childish hand, with many spelling mistakes. She brought the notebook to show us, and in the breaks at work she read aloud from it in a sing-song voice, like a child who has only just learned the whole alphabet: her entries began with the date, then went on, ‘A piece of bread for breakfast. From nine to ten, scraped down parkit.’ The afternoon was also spent scraping down the ‘parkit’, and the same again in the evening.

  When her mistress had seen the results, she said, ‘Here’s some money – now, you go straight out and buy a whole litre of milk and the ingredients to make chocolate blancmange with vanilla sauce, and then you’re to eat it all yourself. You’re half starved.’

  I heard Ruth Hirsch tell this story, inconsequential in itself, at least ten times, and I never tired of it. It was Ruth’s greatest experience and the high point of her life: the tale of how she was told to make a whole blancmange with plenty of sauce and eat it all by herself.

  What would have become of her if she had survived? She had such touching charm, in her shy, simple way, that she was one of the dead whom I mourned for many years. For the figure of millions of dead means nothing much to anyone. We cling to the image of a single face, and for me it was the face of Ruth Hirsch.

  The first name of my other neighbour at the bench of lathes was really Anna. Her parents were Russian, and had called her Nyura when she was little. As that pet name wasn’t known in Berlin, it became Nora. She signed her name that way as well: Nora Schmilewicz.

  Nora too was a very pretty girl; in fact a voluptuous beauty. Whenever I looked at her I was reminded of the women who modelled for Rubens. She might have become very fat in time, but she didn’t live long enough for that.

  She was startlingly beautiful in her own way, with deep black hair, expressive black eyes, a lovely mouth and unusually regular, white teeth. But she suffered from something I had not seen in any of the other women doing forced labour: she had swollen legs as a result of oedema caused by malnutrition. A Jewish doctor – he couldn’t call himself a doctor any more, only a man who treated Jews – had told her, ‘What you need can’t be bought in a pharmacy, only in food shops, and only in peacetime at that. There’s nothing I can do for you.’

  As the daughter of well-to-do Russians, Nora was much better educated than Ruth. Her mother had died very young, and her widowed father had a non-Jewish housekeeper, known to Nora as Auntie. But now her father, too, was dead.

  Nora still lived in her parents’ large apartment in Urbanstrasse. She lived in one large room, where all the furniture from her parents’ household was stored
. A Jewish family was accommodated in each of the other rooms.

  ‘Auntie’ still played a large part in Nora’s life. There was a strange love–hate relationship between them. Auntie must have been a highly strung, hysterical woman. Sometimes she called Nora her child, and gave her food, at other times she scolded her in the most vulgar language.

  She had a key to the Urbanstrasse apartment, and now and then she turned up in Nora’s room in the middle of the night. When the girl woke, sensing that there was someone standing beside her bed, Auntie might smother her with kisses, declaring, ‘You are all I have; you are my lover’s child, so you’re my child too.’ Or then again, she might let fly with a wildly anti-Semitic tirade of abuse. Nora suffered a good deal from this woman.

  Nora and I were once invited to Ruth’s home on her birthday. Her father had been skilfully exiled to the kitchen, where we politely wished him a good day. He muttered and scolded and called us names, but only to himself. Ruth’s mother, overweight and sick as she was, sat beside him and didn’t say anything.

  ‘It’s very cramped at home,’ Ruth had warned us in advance. Indeed, it was terrible. Cupboards were stacked on top of each other in a tiny room with a very high ceiling, and those three people lived there. The only space was a narrow pathway through the middle of the room.

  Apart from us, a woman who seemed to be a cousin had come. A gramophone was brought out, the kind with a horn, and we played records of ancient hit songs on it. I remember one record that I didn’t know at all, typical honky-tonky 1920s stuff, songs about: ‘Records, black matzos we call them, everyone knows them, everyone has them, records are the latest thing,’ … and so on.

  All of it is imprinted on my memory like a scene from a film. The raucous gramophone, the embarrassingly Yiddish hit songs, and the terrible birthday coffee party. The cousin was very ugly, with extremely fat legs, and had no inhibitions at all. As she danced she raised her skirt right up. It was so grotesque, and the whole atmosphere so awful that I thought: there ought to be some way to capture this for later.

  Nora and I glanced swiftly at each other, and then looked away again. After two hours we said goodbye. Ruth’s tour de force had been to bake a cake, using potatoes. She didn’t really mean to tell us how furious her father had been, but it slipped out. He had been deprived of potatoes for the sake of that cake. Like good girls, we said what a lovely party it had been, and left.

  Hand in hand, Nora and I went down the streets in silence. After a while we exchanged glances again, and quickly, with very few words, we agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone else about the party. Not a word about the wretched background; Ruth’s so-called parents; the barely edible potato cake; the music and the fat cousin hopping about. I said, ‘Someone ought to make a film showing how a Jewish girl’s birthday party changes from year to year. First there’s Ruth with her non-Jewish women neighbours, in the family’s own house, and the garden with all the children. And then things get worse every year: first the Christian children don’t come to the birthday party, and in the end all we see is the Hirsch family in their emergency quarters in Berlin.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right? Who on earth would make a film about Ruth’s birthday?’ asked Nora.

  So I told her that after these terrible times, other days would come, and we ought to tell posterity what was happening now. She stood still, and replied, ‘Yes, I see what you mean, and you’re right. You must make that film. You’re going to be the only one of us to survive; Ruth and I won’t.’

  2

  It was hard to leave our apartment in the dark in autumn and winter to go to Spandau, and then come back in the evening when it was dark again. When I finally got home, worn out by my many hours at work and the long journey, my lonely father would be waiting for me: half-starved as he was, he had been with me all day in his thoughts.

  He often took his meals at Danziger’s Diner in Königstrasse. He had a few acquaintances there, and found a little entertainment talking to other Jewish widowers and similar lonely people. He frequently talked to a lawyer from south Germany whose Aryan wife had left him. This man had once been extremely prosperous and well-known.

  For a meal at Danziger’s you had to hand over a five-gram or ten-gram fat coupon, and you would need a magnifying glass to search for a globule of fat on your plate. It was the same with coupons for fifty or a hundred grams of meat. All the restaurants cheated their customers at the time – and in particular, of course, they cheated Jews who had to depend on such establishments.

  Danziger’s served the most meagre fare imaginable. What the place called soup was pure salted water without any other ingredients in it. The main dish consisted of a piece of meat visible only under a microscope, a nasty substitute for gravy and two potatoes. Dessert was a concoction of water and artificial sweetener.

  The boss, Paula Danziger, had severe heart trouble. She was unnaturally fat, and had blue lips and elephantine legs. My father was warned, several times, that her daughter worked with the Gestapo. This young woman, Ruth, who was also very fat and had a face covered with spots, tried flirting with all the male customers at the diner. And they all obliged her, paying her compliments and laughing at her jokes, because, without exception, they were terrified of this Jewish informer.

  Every day my father brought one of those horrible lunches home for me, to be heated up in the evening, and I was so unspeakably hungry that I ate it. Of course it tasted disgusting, and I never felt full after eating it, but at least it was something to put in my mouth.

  He often had the gas lit in the kitchen before I came home. As soon as he heard my key in the door, he put the pan on the gas flame so that I could have some of the hot, thin soup at once. Then we sat together for a while, and I told him about my day of forced labour.

  ‘What’s going on here? They’re queuing up at your workbench,’ asked Edith Rödelsheimer one day, as she passed me during a break. Three or four girls were waiting in line to talk to me.

  I had met the musicologist again soon after I began working for Siemens, and we were both glad to see one another. After I had behaved so naïvely at the Fontanepromenade employment office that she had to rescue me from disaster, her influence gave me a great advantage: now I was the one to whom others turned for advice. Most of my colleagues came from a background very different from mine; few of them had any higher education. Now I heard my companions telling me, ‘There’s another girl who has her school-leaving certificate working in the next room. I simply must introduce you to each other.’

  I had learned to adjust to an abnormal situation and come to terms with it. But again and again I was beside myself with rebellious feelings, crying out silently for liberty. One way that I tried to give the immeasurable horror and monotony of my existence at Siemens some kind of meaning was by getting to know as many of my companions as possible, and finding out all I could about their individual lives.

  In our breaks at work, I was always going round to collect stories of their impressions and experiences. Many of my colleagues didn’t like that. ‘Why do you go paying so much attention to those girls all the time?’ they asked. ‘We belong together, and it’s not so nice anywhere else as in our room.’

  Hermann Jalowicz aged sixty-two, in Berlin in 1939.

  ‘I know, but I have to get to know everyone,’ I would reply.

  So I was pleased when the supervisor walked through the hall one very cold winter’s day asking for volunteers to shovel snow. Freedom from using my hips to operate the lathe. Freedom from the workshop, out into the wonderful, fresh, snowy air! There were not many other volunteers. Most of the women doing forced labour came from poor backgrounds, and thought it was better to do a job that they had learned at one of the lathes than to clear snow.

  Unfortunately it took us little more than an hour to clear the path all the way to the entrance of the works, but it was wonderful! Of course Edith Rödelsheimer was another who had volunteered, and once again she introduced me to other women. We got on very
well. I met a very nice nursery-school teacher from the hall next to ours. She was a good-looking young married woman, with two children. ‘You’re a young mother, so why do you have to work here?’ I asked her. She told me that her own mother had been allowed to look after the children instead of her, and they both preferred that arrangement. She herself enjoyed being with other people, whereas her children’s chatter got on her nerves, while her mother hated working on the factory floor.

  Another woman who interested me very much was Betti Riesenfeld; at over forty, she was an old lady from my point of view at that time. I knew her slightly from meeting her at a golden-wedding anniversary party in the well-respected Jewish Wolff family. She was tiny but well-proportioned, with snow-white hair, a fringe, and a pert snub nose – an unmarried bourgeois Jewish woman.

  She worked as a quality controller at Siemens. In the broad gangway down the middle of the factory hall stood a table with a stool placed on it. Riesenfeld sat on this stool, with a container beside her in which finished items were placed; she had to measure every single screw. Any that did not match the prescribed norm were thrown out as rejects.

  Fräulein Riesenfeld, who had an education at a girls’ secondary school for the humanities behind her, followed by training as an office worker and a household shared with her mother, was now, so to speak, enthroned above us, and visibly enjoyed her superior status. When anyone came over to her this tiny creature called down from on high, ‘Hand it up, and let’s see if everything’s all right.’ At the end of every working day, she stood at the door as we all filed past her separately, and said, ‘See you bright and early tomorrow!’