Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  On that day, 18 March 1941, I had an appointment to see the Siemens doctor first thing in the morning. Frau Koch had said she was coming to visit us in the morning, and I assumed that I would be home at midday. My father and I were going to take her to lunch at Danziger’s, to show her the place – although non-Jews never usually went to such cafés.

  When I was coming down the steps at Alexanderplatz Station, I saw Frau Koch standing there. She was white as a sheet. ‘Have you been waiting here long?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘About an hour,’ she replied. She wanted to prepare me for her news, but she went about it very clumsily. ‘Your Vaddi,’ she kept saying – she meant Vati, short for ‘father’, but she annoyed me, because it sounded affected and did not reflect her real Berlin dialect. ‘I don’t like the look of your Vaddi,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your Vaddi isn’t very well.’ She went on talking to me like this until we reached 9 Prenzlauer Strasse. Then Aunt Grete came to meet me in the front hall.

  ‘Your father is sick. Your father is very sick. It’s hopeless. He’s dead,’ she stammered. She really did break the news in that order. Curiously enough, the word ‘hopeless’ shook me more than that final, ‘He’s dead.’

  At this point, summoned by telegram, Emil Koch and my aunt Sylvia Asarch, Doris Schapiro’s daughter, arrived. None of the family, more particularly my father, had liked Sylvia very much; she was considered demanding and spoiled, and decades after her flight from Russia she still put on the airs of a rich estate owner.

  Frau Koch burst into fits of convulsive weeping. Her husband stood there stiffly. It was clear to him that everyone knew his wife was so grief-stricken because the love of her life was dead.

  Sylvia, with her wide experience of life, understood the situation very quickly. It was she who now looked after Emil: she took his head in her hands and rocked it gently back and forth, all the time saying, in her Russian way, ‘There, there, there. You are a remarkable man! A truly unique man!’ He had an unusual wife, she added, a brilliant wife, made in the mould of the great film stars, and he loved her, even with her love for others – she kept talking to him, paying such silly compliments again and again, meanwhile leaving on his fireman’s uniform a dusting of the face powder she always wore, which was a shade of pale lilac. Her performance finally enabled him to mourn for his friend too, and after all, there was really no reason for him to feel jealous now.

  When they had all gone again, Grete and I set to work doing all that still had to be done. We were able to get the death announcements printed free by a former client of my father’s, and we took them to the main post office late that same evening. Aunt Grete was very short-sighted, and did not feel safe on her feet in the darkened streets. I had to support her to keep her from stumbling and falling. As I guided her home, while she clutched my arm, I thought: this is the story of my life, propping up other people. No one props me up.

  A surprisingly large number of mourners came to the funeral. A representative of the Palestine Office spent five minutes churning out standard phrases about ‘the funeral of a veteran’, without ever saying anything personal about my father. I felt like slapping the man’s face and telling him to stop it. For I had realised that there was something wrong when my father had been deprived of his chance of emigrating to Palestine.

  ‘I don’t want to die in this pernicious country,’ he had told me. That was also the reason for not buying a plot for his grave. ‘Why bother when we’re going to emigrate? That would just be throwing money away.’ The fact was, however, that he wouldn’t have had a penny to spare for it. So now I couldn’t have him buried next to my mother. Instead, he lay in a plot right at the back of the Weissensee cemetery, by the wall.

  ‘Misfortune will befall the man who hardens his heart’ – that message from Rabbi Singermann’s funeral oration was mainly meant for me. Or at least, that was what I felt. Singermann knew me very well. He was literally addressing my conscience.

  Until the funeral I had been reasonably calm and composed. Only after it did I collapse, dissolving in tears. This sudden loss was terrible for me, and so was the sense of being entirely alone. I was crying out in the street when my old schoolfriend Leni Riemer’s mother came towards me. ‘Frau Riemer, Frau Riemer! My father has suddenly died!’ I sobbed.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, walking on. Then she turned and said with no emotion in her voice at all, ‘May God console you.’ It made me realise that most people were egotistic, concerned only with themselves, and more so than ever in these times. I had to pull myself together to face the outside world and grow up in a hurry.

  A few days after my father’s death I had a terrible, very intense anxiety dream. We were both running along a paved road with pursuers behind us. I made good progress, but my father, running beside me, stepped on a lime-twig. He was wearing felt slippers, items of footwear that in real life he had never possessed. Every two or three steps one of his slippers stuck to the ground, so that he had to stop. Whenever that happened I freed the slipper again. He put it on, went a few more steps, I ran ahead – and the same thing happened all over again. ‘Run, my child. I can’t. I’m stuck here, you can see I am. Just run for it!’ he begged me.

  ‘No!’ I said. ‘I’ll never let you down, never!’

  This dream was repeated again and again. At last I woke up, and suddenly I felt certain that my father had died to leave me free to go my own way. So that I would be able to live, so that I must and would live, because that was what he had wanted.

  I got my doctor, Dr Gutherz, to write me another sick note. Soon after that I was summoned to see the works doctor at Siemens again. I briefly told him what had happened since my last visit to him, and how I had found my father dead at home. ‘The most I can do is write you another sick note to cover the next ten to fourteen days,’ he said. For wartime, that was an astonishingly long period to take off work.

  But I badly needed the time to settle my affairs. They included the matter of the small pension that my father had from his position as a notary. This was paid to Jews only in exceptional circumstances, if they had fought at the front in the Great War and had no other income: eighty marks a month, personally allotted by the President of the Berlin Superior Court of Justice.* We had met our basic expenses – rent, electric light, and so on – out of this sum. It was a privilege that we never discussed with anyone.

  I went to the Superior Court of Justice with the money order that had come by post. I was going to offer to return the money, but at the same time ask whether I might go on receiving the pension. As I could hardly demand to see the President himself, I said at reception that I would like to speak to the President of the Superior Court’s secretary – in person.

  That young lady probably felt much honoured. She was blonde, slim, and wore her hair in what was called a Hitler knot. I stood two metres away from her desk, holding the money, and explained, ‘I’m an honest woman. I’m sure no one would have noticed if I’d kept it.’ And very briefly, I described my situation.

  ‘Oh no!’ ‘Oh God!’ ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for you!’ ‘Oh, please don’t stand in that military position,’ she said, much affected. She was wearing an ivory necklace, and chewed on it in embarrassment now and then. Then she said, ‘You wait here a moment. I’ll go in and win the boss over!’

  Two minutes later she came out again, beaming, and said, ‘You’ll go on getting the pension. But there’s no legal basis for it, and it would be disastrous to create such a precedent. So you mustn’t mention it to a soul.’

  I thanked her fervently, and of course I promised to keep my mouth shut. I thought to myself: not only are our enemies prejudiced against us, we have prejudices of our own against all non-Jews. This young lady was so helpful and sympathetic. Why must we be such total strangers to each other?

  I had been so impressed by her habit of chewing her necklace that I went into Woolworth’s and spent fifty pfennigs on the cheapest necklace in the sto
re, incredibly ugly and raspberry-red. I wanted it to put it in my mouth; it was like a compulsion. When my friend Irene Scherhey saw it she asked, ‘Are you crazy? What a frightful necklace! I’ve never seen you wear anything like that before.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘I must have left it lying around somewhere.’ And then I threw it away.

  I went back to forced labour after those weeks off. Some things had changed. Edith Rödelsheimer, who had been working for a while as wages clerk, could no longer hold that elevated position because she was Jewish. In her place, one Fräulein Lorenz, an uneducated worker from another department, was given the job. She might find reading and writing difficult, but she was Aryan. And Edith Rödelsheimer the musicologist had to operate a stamping machine, a job that would normally have been done by an automaton. The unbalanced physical activity hurt her arms terribly, but she was glad that she wasn’t required to be more attentive in any other way. In her mind she was singing her way through whole operatic scores from A to Z.

  Soon after my return I had a long conversation with our supervisor, Schönfeld the SS man. I went off to his cubicle so that he could inspect a screw I had made: he had to certify that the machine was correctly set and that its product passed muster before I could begin making a prescribed number of parts.

  ‘So you’ve been certified off sick?’ he asked as he held up the screw to the light. There was concern in his voice. Of course we were under observation from where he sat in his glass box with a view of the whole workshop. ‘My father died,’ I replied. He looked at me with great intensity and sympathy, and condoled with me silently. He could not reach out a hand to me, but our mere eye contact did not escape the notice of my colleagues outside.

  I plucked up my courage. ‘I want to leave this job,’ I said. ‘But as I’m doing forced labour I can’t give notice.’

  ‘Why do you want to leave us?’

  ‘I want to save myself.’

  ‘But I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’ll be sent to some other workplace, and you won’t find such pleasant colleagues anywhere else. I chose my best tool-setter for the nicest girls.’ He really did seem to be concerned for me. ‘What will you do on your own?’ he went on. ‘Out there you’ll be alone in the icy wastes.’

  ‘That’s where I want to be, and I want to be alone. Because I can see where all this is going. They’ll deport us, and that will be the end for all of us,’ I said. He nodded his head briefly; the movement was barely visible. ‘We won’t be safe from deportation for ever as armaments workers,’ I went on.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll fix it. We’ll fire you for sickness. God bless you, and I wish you luck on your way through those icy wastes.’

  Those were the last words we exchanged. Outside, I was asked, ‘You’ve been talking to Schönfeld for hours. And he held something up to the light as if it were a Christmas tree bauble. What was all that about?’

  I told them, ‘There was something funny about the part I’d made.’ I even remember, to this day, that it was a brass screw.

  And then a miracle happened: Else Gottschalk, my academically educated friend from the giantesses’ gang, got a permit to emigrate to America. She was going on one of the very last ships to leave before the trap finally snapped shut.

  When she had all her papers, she came to the factory one last time, no longer in the overall she wore as typical work clothing, but in a pale, elegant dust-coat and a very ladylike hat. She walked through the whole workshop to hand in her key at the cloakroom, saying goodbye to a few of her acquaintances, and to her tool-setter. She did not shake hands with him, of course. He was the man with the party symbol on his overalls.

  On the return journey she walked through our workshop again, without looking to right or left. Or rather, she did not exactly walk; she strode, a proud and free figure, all the way down the long aisle. We all stopped working for a moment and looked as she passed by. I don’t think anyone begrudged her that prospect of liberty. But I never saw so many concentrated glances of yearning again.

  Then the door opened, she was outside, and I thought: unforgettable! Two hundred women were thinking, with immeasurable longing, of just one word: freedom! It was a chorus that rang out louder, and without a single sound, than the most deafening of Nazi propaganda.

  4

  Soon after sitting Shivah, the week of mourning after my father’s death, Georg Ernsthal, from whom we rented the room, was given notice to vacate the apartment. Jewish tenants were being turned out on the street everywhere now, and we had no protection. So I had to look for somewhere else to live, and that was getting more difficult all the time.

  Finally I found accommodation with a Jewish family at 26 Schmidstrasse, a slum area in the northern part of Kreuzberg, on the border of the Berlin-Mitte district. Siegfried and Franziska Jacobsohn had two very nice adolescent children, Hilde and Werner. The furnished room that I rented from them, however, was a sad joke. It was as thin as a small towel, and gloomy, because the street was so narrow that the sun never shone in. All the concentrated misery of my situation was expressed by this room. The furnishing I found there consisted of a tiny table, a chair, a huge crate meant for furniture removals, and a piano with no strings that barred access to the room next door, which was also rented out.

  At first Frau Jacobsohn had even wanted money for the fact that this room was ‘partly furnished’. However, I successfully resisted this demand. I wrote out an agreement covering a page in my notebook and showed it to my guardian, the lawyer Moritz Jacoby. A former partner of my father’s, he could not stop laughing when he looked at this agreement, which was as comprehensive as if I were trying to sell or rent something worth millions.

  Then, with the help of Aunt Grete, who was working unpaid for the Jewish Community, I got hold of the furniture I needed. As well as a bed there was a cylinder desk, as it was known: a writing desk with a cylindrical semi-circular drawer that could be closed. I locked my few foodstuffs in this desk; unfortunately, that was necessary because Frau Jacobsohn was envious if, for instance, I bought sausage with my few meat coupons.

  ‘But Frau Jacobsohn, you get meat for yours,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but sausage … my children are so hungry!’ I could understand her, but it was unedifying. All the same, we gradually became friends, and often had long conversations. I had plenty of time now that I was no longer going to work for Siemens every day.

  It was only money that I lacked. I was not earning anything, and the pension received by me instead of my father covered my rent and electricity, but not much more. I was so impoverished that I sold my coal coupons in order to buy food. It was horribly cold in winter, but I had decided to go cold and hungry and simply sleep through mealtimes rather than waste my strength doing forced labour.

  Aunt Grete was among the first to receive a deportation order in the autumn of 1941. The days before she was taken away were bad. A woman I knew advised me to go with her, saying that we young people must look after our older relations in the concentration camp. Even then, however, instinct told me that all who went there were going to their deaths.

  Aunt Grete herself wondered whether we shouldn’t stick together. ‘Won’t you come with me voluntarily? Sooner or later everyone will have to go.’

  It was very difficult for me to say no. I felt I was being hardhearted. I could hardly say, ‘You can’t save yourself. But I am going to do everything imaginable to survive.’ All the same, that was what I thought.

  Grete was a terribly prickly character, but at heart she had been the kindest and most generous of our family. After my grandfather’s early death, she had continued to run his haulage company with great enterprise and energy. Then, when it went bust during the First World War, she had made her living teaching shorthand and typing and had built up a secretarial and duplication business. She had worked hard to keep not only herself but Uncle Arthur too. After my mother’s death my father and I were often her guests. I always took it for granted that
she would look after us all, although my thanks left something to be desired.

  We spent the last days before her deportation sitting together all the time. Hour by hour, she tore up old photographs that she could not take with her, but didn’t want to leave behind. It was at this time that she told me, ‘I loved you more than your mother did, but I was never fated to find a husband and have a child.’ And she confessed something else to me: ‘I have loved one man all my life. He was popular with all the women, and he certainly did not return my feelings. He was your father.’ I did not let her see how much this information shook me.

  One of her many customers who was also a personal friend of Aunt Grete’s was Herr Hidde. He ran a radio repairs workshop on Alexanderplatz. Because he was tall as a giant, immensely fat and heavily built, you expected his voice to be a deep bass, but it was a high falsetto.

  Of course Hidde was an anti-Nazi. When Aunt Grete received her deportation order, he said, ‘Eger, I give you my word of honour: if they try to take you away, then that’s the end of my workshop. You did all the office stuff for me, I can’t manage it on my own, and I don’t want other people meddling. Can’t the two of us emigrate to the North Pole? I’ll catch whales and you can cook them in kosher sauce.’

  ‘Stop talking nonsense, Hidde,’ replied Aunt Grete. ‘This is deadly serious.’

  These last conversations before her deportation were deeply tragic, but at the same time comic. With a tearful expression on her face she kept telling me, ‘On the day they come to take me away, I shall leave a letter for you under the doormat.’ At least ten times, she told me not to forget the letter under the mat.

  I felt unspeakably sorry for her, and I would so much have liked to help, but I couldn’t bear it any more. I was even a little relieved when it was over. Her apartment was sealed, and I retrieved the letter from under the doormat. In her best handwriting she had written that our family had always been honest and upright people, and I must remain honest and upright too. She asked for God’s blessing on me, and so on and so forth. My goodness, I thought; so much fuss about that letter.