Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  When our tool-setter Max Schulz bent over Ruth’s machine we could all see that not only were they were very like each other, they looked almost identical: the same shape of nose, the same hair colour, the same complexion. It was positively uncanny. Max Schulz was at least forty, while Ruth wasn’t twenty yet, but even people in other gangs noticed it. ‘Your tool-setter and that girl look like identical twins. I’ve never seen such a similarity before.’ I usually replied, ironically, ‘I expect it comes of the racial difference between them.’

  This striking phenomenon corresponded to something very personal. Ruth was Schulz’s great love. Not just a passing fancy, but his great love. And Schulz was Ruth’s first and, because she was not fated to live much longer, her only love.

  To a man like Schulz, such feelings denoted profound conflict. As I knew from his shy confidences, he had a wife whom he found unpleasant, malicious and demanding. That was one of the things that sent him to confess to his priest every week. ‘My priest says that love is good,’ he told us, ‘and I must love you all.’ But I could guess what he really meant.

  There was a second phenomenon of this kind at Siemens, and I discussed it with Edith Rödelsheimer, but only once. When we were talking about the similarity between Max Schulz and Ruth Hirsch, she said, ‘Nature has even allowed herself two such games, and everyone with the slightest intelligence here has noticed it.’

  I knew who she meant: Schönfeld the SS man and me. Our supervisor sat in a separate glazed compartment in the factory workshop. He was clever enough to know how to employ us so that production would go on without a hitch. He had the same grey-green eyes as I did, the same shape of nose and mouth, the same teeth. We might have been twins.

  Glancing at the man, I thought that I was looking in the mirror. It was terrible. We had both noticed it, and each of us knew that the other was also aware of it. Nature had indulged in a whim whose meaning we did not understand.

  One Sunday I was on the way to Alexanderplatz Station with my father. I saw Schönfeld coming towards us on the steps up to the station, with about half a dozen other uniformed SS men. It would have been wrong to exchange any greeting, but I looked him full in the face as I passed him. His upper body literally gave way as he cast down his eyes, deeply ashamed, and blushed.

  Although our wages were pitifully small, we adopted a piecework rate. Now and then the timekeeper came into the factory hall, trying to look inconspicuous, and checked the speed of our work. However, we were always ready for him. There was a warning system in all departments of Siemens, letting workers know in advance that the timekeeper was on the way, so that no one would lower the rate for the job, which was poor enough anyway, by working with excessive zeal. We also made sure that jobs were fairly shared out, so that everyone got the basic wage.

  That mattered much more to the others than to me. I couldn’t really feel either glad of what we called ‘roast pork’ – a productive job that paid well – or resentful when the job was too difficult for us to meet the piecework rate.

  Matters improved when I discovered that there was a saboteurs’ ring at Siemens. Those members of my gang who were not too stupid or unsuitable in character for it were gradually drawn into the ring, and that made it far easier to bear the mind-destroying tedium of the work. Exercising unobtrusive sabotage meant going to the farthest limit of what was permissible. In addition, you had to know all about the tolerance values of the product we were making, and the workers in all the different parts of the factory had to co-operate. The real achievement consisted in setting up these links.

  To take one example: a nut had a tolerance of a fraction of a millimetre. The internal thread could be only a certain size, no larger than x and no smaller than y. Within those limits – and this called for great precision – you cut the internal thread of the nut as narrow as possible. And in another department of Siemens, the part that was to be screwed into this nut was cut as wide as possible, and consequently would not fit. The separate parts passed their separate quality controls without any objection, because they had been made to fit within the scope of tolerance. It was only when they were put together that they refused to fit and were thrown out as rejects. Ruth Hirsch was the best saboteur of us all, because she worked like a precision tool herself to achieve that tiny fraction of a millimetre.

  This sabotage ring worked extremely well, and was never exposed. Not only did Max Schulz belong to it, so did another tool-setter called Hermann: a strong-minded intellectual who had been a Social Democrat before 1933, when the National Socialists came to power, and who had attended adult evening classes. After the war, he intended to take the Abitur, the school-leaving certificate, and thus qualify to study at university. Hermann was a radical anti-Nazi, and a leader in ideological discussions. It was also Hermann who protected us from the sadistic Prahl when the latter was appointed first-aid man to our department. ‘For heaven’s sake – that could mean physical contact between an Aryan and a Jewish woman!’ Hermann pointed out. ‘Surely it’s racially disgraceful for Herr Prahl to bandage the finger of a woman like that?’

  As a means of conveying such ideas to the supervisor Schönfeld, we made use of one Herr Schön, another curious figure among the tool-setters. He was in his early fifties, extremely thin, and also vain; he thought himself handsome, and was always asking the young girls in our gang, ‘Don’t you think I’m good-looking?’ Every few minutes he would take out a pocket mirror in order to examine a bald patch surrounded by a wreath of grey hair. ‘My hair still looks good,’ he would say, ‘even if there isn’t much of it left.’ Everyone laughed at him, Jews and non-Jews alike. He was stupid enough to have thought that if he joined the National Socialist party wonderful privileges, including money and property, would come his way, and he would no longer have to work hard in a poorly paid job. None of that, however, had happened.

  Schulz and Hermann took him in hand, cautiously discussed matters with him, and they gradually succeeded in their aim: Schön became an anti-Nazi. He was even thought worthy to join the sabotage ring. ‘I understand it all now,’ he declared firmly. ‘The Nazis are criminals. My parents and grandparents were always decent folk. I don’t want to be a member of a criminal organisation!’ It was explained to him, however, that he would do better to stay in the Party, so that he could get access to internal information from the Nazi cell in the Siemens works, and to a certain extent even influence that cell. Here, of course, Schulz and Hermann had to take his stupidity into account, and they flattered his vanity to very good effect.

  Indoctrination in racial policy was his strong point; the stupid questions he asked, taking the nonsensical and pseudo-scientific contradictions of Nazi racial doctrine as his target, were provocative. He himself wasn’t bright enough to have come up with them, but the questions were devised by Hermann, precisely phrased and then handed in writing to Herr Schön, who learned them by heart.

  By the normal laws to protect workers, only men could work at the really large machines. At Siemens, however, particularly tall Jewish women had to use them. We called these women ‘the giantesses’, and the machine parts they made were so large that they had to use a special tool – a hand threading die – to cut threads inside the nuts. After a while the women’s wrists hurt so badly that they could hardly bear it.

  The tool-setter of this gang was called Stakowski, in reality Scrzsowki or something like that – a complicated Polish name, anyway. Stakowski was a Nazi and wore the Party symbol on his working clothes. Otherwise he was correctly behaved, not uncivil, but he never said anything personal to the women workers. In a friendly enough tone he told them what to do, but without a joke, a smile, or any remark that was not to do with the job.

  That changed when Stakowski took a management course that entailed a great deal of theory. To the amazement of the women in his gang, it turned out that he knew one of them had studied mathematics. He spoke to her diffidently: ‘You’re a mathematician, and I have difficulty with maths myself.’ Then – by dint
of much going back and forth with notes wrapped in floor cloths – he asked her questions, and she wrote down the answers in the toilet. The ice was broken. To show his gratitude, he even brought sandwiches to work for her, an absolute delicacy at the time. She thought she must be dreaming, it couldn’t be real, because like all of us she was terribly hungry.

  Gradually, Stakowski extended this personal contact to the entire gang, and in turn he was drawn into the card games played by Schulz, Schön and Hermann. They met him regularly in the Aryans’ toilet and brought their influence to bear on him. From being a fanatical Nazi he slowly changed to being a harmless fellow-traveller, and that meant a good deal.

  Our tool-setters often disappeared to the toilet for hours. Sometimes they even included Prahl in the card games, so as not to leave the brute in isolation. Of course, we showed solidarity with each other. If a machine broke down and had to be reset, if a cutting tool had to be sharpened or replaced, we would unobtrusively ask one or other of the tool-setters for help. We knew exactly who was friends with whom, and where we could turn.

  Our experiences of these men, who were employed on a regular basis at Siemens, were so good that I often wondered how the dreadful persecution of the Jews could have come about. The men we met here were not really anti-Semitic, they were perfectly nice.

  Of course, that wasn’t true everywhere. First, Berlin was different from the provinces. Secondly, I came into contact only with a certain section of society. And thirdly, I realised that the same Aryan German who hated the rich Jew from the big house like poison – maybe he thought the Jew had once defrauded him over the sale of a plot of land, maybe he fervently wished the man out of the way so that he himself could appropriate the Jew’s living-room carpet – that same Aryan German had nothing against starving young girls who worked hard, just as he worked hard himself.

  We forced labourers had our own meeting place in the toilet too, since Aryan men could not enter this room, which was reserved for Jewish women. Small social occasions were sometimes held there; a woman who had really wanted to go on stage as a soubrette did a comic dance for us, while we sang a hit of the time and clapped our hands. And Else Gottschalk, one of my few academically educated colleagues, gave lectures on Spanish literature – in fact, she gave them specially for me.

  She was an outsider on the factory floor, because on principle she addressed everyone by the formal Sie pronoun. ‘We mustn’t descend to the level of our enemies,’ she said. ‘After all, our background is not that of factory workers.’ She was regarded as ridiculous for the way she distanced herself from the others, and I laughed at her myself. Secretly, however, I thought she was right, and was happy to be in contact with this forty-year-old working in the giantesses’ gang.

  On her side, our friendship soon became a stormy one. She would often put her arm round my shoulders, commanding, ‘You will have breakfast with me!’ She advised me against contact with many of our colleagues. ‘They’re not your sort.’

  Unfortunately she was also madly jealous. She couldn’t stand Edith Rödelsheimer because she saw that I respected and admired her. Edith had a tiny nose set well away from her upper lip, so that when she was talking you saw that she had huge teeth. Her skin was covered with dense, fair down and she wore impressive dark horn-rimmed glasses because she was short-sighted. ‘I warn you, Fräulein Jalowicz, Rödelsheimer is a witch!’ my new friend informed me. ‘You can tell from that tiny nose.’

  Else Gottschalk was an Aryan convert to Judaism. Her father had been very briefly and very passionately married to a Jewish woman who died young. When he married again he had insisted on his second wife converting too. This marriage produced several daughters who were brought up in the Jewish faith but then went their separate ways. One had married a Jew and emigrated to America. Another had married a high-ranking officer and turned her back on Judaism. Else Gottschalk had never married. Before 1933 she intended to leave the Jewish community because she had become an atheist. After the Nazis came to power, however, she proclaimed herself Jewish loud and clear, and went back to regular attendance at synagogue out of a sense of solidarity.

  I was once invited to her home. She lived in a large, handsome apartment block in Wilmersdorf, with a lift shaft surrounded by metal grilles. As I entered the stairwell I was aware of a very characteristic smell – the unmistakable mixed aromas of good coffee and floor polish. So such people still exist, I thought: people who make proper coffee and use good quality polish on their floors.

  Else Gottschalk lived quietly alone with her father. That was a link between us. I had imagined the well-educated gentleman, of whom she had told me so much, as tall and with a mane of white hair. Instead I was facing a small, bald-headed man. She had a habit of placing her hand on that head quite often, and he always reacted by saying, ‘Don’t do that!’

  When we were drinking ersatz coffee she said, ‘Well, Papa’ – she stressed the second syllable, Papá – ‘as you’ll see, I didn’t promise more than I could perform. Fräulein Jalowicz can imitate that primitive tool-setter who comes from the Bromberg area so brilliantly that she has me in tears of laughter. We don’t have much to laugh about these days, but you’d enjoy the performance too. May I ask for a sample of your art, Fräulein Jalowicz?’

  Flattered, I laughed and stood up. But then I suddenly thought better of it, and said, ‘No, I’d rather not. I don’t want to make fun of that simple, friendly anti-Nazi.’ I knew exactly what I was expected to perform: Max Schulz in his wooden clogs, dancing the polka on the factory floor and singing a comic love song in his thick Berlin accent.

  Here the bald little man with the intellectual face stood up too, and said, ‘No, Else, you didn’t promise me too much. I congratulate you on your friendship. You have made friends with an unusually valuable human being. Allow me, dear young lady, to express my own approval of the liking my daughter feels for you.’ At the end of this little speech he announced, ‘And now let me show you my holy of holies.’

  He opened the door at the end of the corridor. It led into a small room lined with tall and very dusty bookshelves. There were cobwebs everywhere, and the atmosphere was strangely magical. Herr Gottschalk had clearly spared neither trouble nor expense to fill this room with all the editions of Goethe’s Faust that he could find, and all the critical works on that famous drama. He was a great admirer of Goethe, and spent his leisure time researching the character and history of Faust.

  We left our ersatz coffee to get cold. And as we stood in that remarkable, dusty atmosphere among the spiders’ webs, he took individual volumes off the shelves and talked about them. I was fascinated and enchanted.

  At last it was time to go. We were already out in the hall when he said, ‘Oh, and I have something else very precious to show you.’ He took a Chinese translation of Faust off the shelf and said, ‘This is a great comfort to me: Germany has betrayed her own German culture, but Faust will live on in China.’

  3

  My visit to Nora Schmilewicz was hardly necessary; her room in Urbanstrasse looked exactly as she had described it to me. I had arranged to visit her one Saturday afternoon and had bought her a few flowers, but by mistake I left them at home.

  I had almost reached the station when I realised. I ran back and unlocked the door, calling out, ‘I forgot my flowers.’ I knew that Hannchen [Johanna] Koch was visiting us, as she did every Saturday.

  ‘Please don’t go out,’ my father had asked me before I left.

  ‘I’m here every Saturday when she comes, and I sit with you two for hours and hours,’ I had replied. These visits were a real torment. My parents had known Hannchen and Emil Koch, who lived in what had once been our little summer house in Kaulsdorf, for many years. He was a firefighter and she worked in a laundry – they were simple folk, but anti-Nazis who had never dropped their acquaintanceship with us.

  Since my mother’s death, Hannchen had been to see us every Saturday. She would sit all day in our cramped room, ostensibly out of readiness
to help and neighbourly love. In reality, however, it was up to us to entertain her. We often actually planned a programme in advance, deciding who could say what, and when. ‘That subject could last one of us half an hour, and then the other can join in the conversation,’ we calculated. The fact that Hannchen’s main interest in visiting us was my father had not escaped anyone we knew, including her husband.

  Now, when I came back to the apartment, the door to our room was bolted on the inside. ‘Open the door; I forgot my flowers,’ I called.

  The door opened, and my father’s bare arm handed the bunch of flowers through the crack in the doorway. ‘Did you have to do that?’ he asked very sharply.

  Johanna and Emil Koch on their wedding day in 1929.

  He was still furious when I got home in the evening. ‘Fancy delivering me up to that woman! Was it worth your while exposing me to such danger when I don’t even like her? She disgusts me!’ It was the only time I heard him deliver such an outburst on that subject.

  A few months later, on 18 March 1941, my father died. He must have guessed that it was coming. A few days before his death the notes in the diary that he kept, finally, in five-pfennig octavo notebooks, were headed, ‘Like being on the high seas.’ He must have been feeling as if he were seasick. He had lain down for a moment, he wrote, he had felt so dizzy, and then it had passed over. But he had realised that this was a case of life or death.

  I was not at home when he died. For the first time since I began to do forced labour, I had taken time off sick, as a result of meeting the Jewish doctor Helene Gutherz. When she and I were exchanging a few words on Alexanderplatz Station, she said at once, ‘What a cough you have! I’ll write you a certificate to be away from work. We all need a few days of rest now and then.’

  I gratefully accepted. What she didn’t say was that she herself badly needed the fee for the medical certificate; she had hardly any sources of income left.