Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  I read it three times and then tore up the sheet of paper. When I was on my way back from Prenzlauer Strasse to Schmidstrasse, I was ashamed of myself. I felt that I had not grieved enough over Aunt Grete’s farewell.

  Desperate people are drawn to the water, or so I imagined, anyway. At nineteen years old I was still very naïve. So I went down to the River Spree, leaned over the rail of the bridge, and groaned dramatically. Whereupon a silly woman wearing a hat with a feather in it passed by, looked at me, looked at the Star of David on my clothing and announced, ‘Oh well, go on, then. It doesn’t matter.’ A Nazi woman didn’t need to show any support for a Jew. At this point a light dawned on me. Stop being so dramatic, I told myself. I was never going to indulge in such artificial spectacles again.

  A few days later I was crossing Alexanderplatz and saw that Hidde had been as good as his word. His workshop was closed. A large notice in the display window said, ‘Business closed until the final victory, for want of spare parts.’ This phrasing was obviously intended to be taken as sarcasm, and passers by stopped, grinned and enjoyed the joke.

  When I next passed that way, the notice had gone again. I stood outside the shop for a moment, looking round undecidedly. A man spoke to me. ‘Wondering where the notice is, are you?’ he asked. ‘The Party came and said he had to take it out of the window. They accused him of wanting to take the piss out of Germany.’

  ‘Oh, I really can’t imagine that,’ I said.

  In October 1941, Grete was deported to Litzmannstadt. That was the name the Nazis had given to the Polish city of Łódź. After that, I had only a single sign of life from her. I twice sent her ten marks, which was a fortune for me in my circumstances at that time. The first time I got a confirmation that she had received the money, signed by Grete herself. After than I heard no more. There was already a rumour circulating that money sent in that way would never end up in the hands of the intended recipients.

  As for Grete, she had meant me to inherit all that she possessed. In the Prenzlauer Strasse apartment, she had kept a collection of wonderful heirlooms from old Russia, above all porcelain and glass items. Of course I never saw any of them again.

  Schönfeld, our supervisor at the Siemens works, had warned me that I would be sent to do forced labour again. I could get a medical certificate to cover ten or fourteen days off work, but the employment agency was soon summoning me again.

  I simply ignored the first letter, an extraordinarily bold response to the authorities, who counted on all citizens to knuckle under to such demands in their fear of the law. Then I got a card bearing the words ‘Second Demand’. I took it to the agency and said, ‘This is funny! It says Second Demand here, but I never had a first one.’

  I was sent to a spinning mill, a small business with what was described as a Jewish department. Before starting work, for some reason or other we had to have a gynaecological examination. An elderly gynaecologist who had a practice of his own in Wühlischstrasse had made an appointment for all of us women and girls to attend at the same time, and kept us waiting for hours. Here I saw the seventeen-year-old twins Hannelore and Rosmarie Herzfeld, whom I knew slightly. They were two years younger than me, were shy and respectful and treated me like an aunt. They even bobbed me a little curtsey.

  When the first Jewish woman was called in, there was a difficulty in examining her. The doctor came into the waiting room and asked, ‘Do you all have such full bladders that I can’t get past them?’ We told him, ‘We can’t go to the toilet – there’s only one for patients here, and we don’t know where the Jews’ toilet is.’

  He snapped at us in vulgar terms. ‘You idiots, piss is piss and shit is shit! It’s the same for all human beings. Now go off and have a pee one by one.’

  Then it was the twins’ turn. He came out of the room where he was examining us and called, ‘A very interesting case, identical twins, both of them virgins, seventeen years old. You must all come and see this!’ His wife and four or five other ladies in good silk dresses – they were having a coffee party – came to see the show. So did a workman, bending his head and kneading his cap in his hand with sheer embarrassment because he felt so awkward.

  Work in the spinning mill was terrible. I was put on the night shift, and had to go to work down streets in pitch darkness. I kept stumbling or even falling over in the dark, and the factory hall where we worked was itself very poorly lit.

  We women workers stood many metres apart in front of a long wall where I had to keep fitting new spindles and switching the machinery on. The first time I did it, the thread broke at once. The forewoman shouted, ‘That’s verging on sabotage, you stupid cow!’

  After a few days I went to the office and told one of the younger members of office staff there, ‘I really am trying to do my best, but I have a nervous illness and the threads keep breaking. You’ll have nothing but trouble with me.’ At that moment the forewoman came in and began shouting at me. ‘We ought to throw this Jewish sow out, stupid creature, she’s not even worth spitting at!’ When she had done something or other in the office she left the room. I told the other staff member, ‘Yes, please do throw me out. You see, I can’t give notice.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ said the girl on the office staff. ‘Right, then we’ll fire you. The forewoman said you were incapable of working.’ She immediately made out my papers and, in friendly tones, wished me good luck.

  But of course the employment agency got in touch again. I received another demand, and once again I didn’t respond. Then the second came, and I thought that when the third card arrived I would have to go. But it didn’t turn out like that.

  Until recently my neighbour in the next room of the Jacobsohns’ house had been Harry Kaplan, a waiter who played the trumpet. When he was taken away for deportation, I had simply gone to bed and pulled the covers over my head in unspeakable fear and desperation. The doorbell rang again while I was alone in the house. The postman had a registered letter for Herr Kaplan. I said, ‘He isn’t here. He’s been taken away.’

  ‘Oh, then I know what I have to write: gone east, no known address,’ said the postman, an elderly man. ‘And I have something else too; there’s supposed to be a Fräulein Jalowicz living here.’ I recognised the envelope at once; it was another summons from the labour exchange.

  ‘Then you’d better put the same on it. Gone east, no known address,’ I said quickly.

  And so my name was eradicated from the employment agency’s card index because I had the impertinence to tell the authorities that I had already been deported.

  5

  I often met Ruth and Nora at the weekend. We went for walks together, and they told me the latest news from the Siemens works. For instance, I learned about the reaction of the tool-setters there when, in 1941, a police decree announced that all Jews must wear a yellow star in public.

  Schulz and Hermann had of course been indignant. Even Stakowski, the Nazi, thought poorly of the idea, and two men called Strahl and Bedurcke, whom I always used to confuse with each other, regarding them as convinced Nazis and far from bright, had been heard saying, ‘We’re ruled by criminals!’ One of them had family out in the country, and sometimes brought the girls in Siemens sandwiches from then on.

  I gradually developed a particular plan for my walks with Ruth and Nora. I wanted to take the opportunity of exploring the city of Berlin and getting to know its population thoroughly. My two friends were not very keen on joining in my game of sociological experimentation, but they did it for my sake. Nora worked out the routes to various places in the city, all of them a long way from our point of departure. There were various stages where I was going to ask a policeman the way.

  I went along the streets with my two dazzlingly beautiful friends one each side of me. Many of the older people stared at the three of us and said, ‘What a shame. Fancy those lovely girls having to wear the Jewish star!’

  The policemen were happy to talk to us, too. ‘Well, my lovelies?’ they would ask.
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br />   Then I introduced myself exactly as the law stipulated: ‘I am a Jewess, place of registration Berlin, registration number so-and-so. May I ask a question?’

  ‘What?’ the policeman would say in a broad Berlin dialect. ‘What did you want? What’s that you say?’

  ‘The law says we have to identify ourselves like that. With a place of registration, a registration number, and pointing out that we’re Jewish. And then, if you allow us, we can ask a question.’

  ‘You mean there’s a law like that? Well, I’ll be blowed if I ever heard the like of it!’ Only the younger officers had enough self-control to avoid showing clearly how surprised and repelled they felt. The older men shook their heads. ‘Come on, there’s no such thing. What was it you said again?’

  ‘I am a Jewess, place of registration Berlin, registration number so-and-so.’

  ‘And saying all that stuff is supposed to be the law?’

  This taught me that not even the police force knew about all the legal regulations and petty acts of harassment that beset us as Jews. Ordinary citizens knew even less about them. The average German housewife was interested in finding out where she could get half a kilo of tomatoes on the black market at not too exorbitant a price, and would burst into tears if her soup was burned. She might or might not have anti-Semitic clichés in her head, but she was not aware of the oppressive regulation of Jews. That gave me an insight into the facts that proved to be important in my later life underground.

  The question that I asked the policeman after this preliminary skirmish ran: ‘Can you tell me how to get from here to X Street?’

  I had always chosen a destination kilometres away. ‘That’s a long way off. You’ll have to go by public transport,’ was the reply.

  ‘We can’t, we’re not allowed to use public transport except going to and from work on weekdays.’*

  ‘I don’t believe it!’

  ‘It’s so, it really is the law.’

  ‘Well, if you can’t use transport then you’ll have to walk. But good heavens, it’s such a long way!’

  The street map of the city was unfolded, and it was clear at once that our way passed through the governmental district. Nora had worked it all out that way in advance.

  ‘We’re not allowed to go along those streets. Jews are forbidden there,’ I explained. We were prohibited from setting foot not only in cinemas and theatres, but also in streets and squares in that part of the city.

  ‘You mean you can’t go by that route? Then it will be even further.’

  Here we got the policeman to work out a long way round, we thanked him politely, and walked away. The whole scene was repeated a little later somewhere else.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said one of these police officers, and he wasn’t even an old one. ‘You’re three nice girls, no one would know you were anything else just from looking at you. Take that bloody star off, hop on the underground and there you are!’ That was the most forceful answer we received, and it had a very encouraging and reassuring effect on us.

  This game mattered a great deal to me, for it taught me to appear self-confident even when I was facing those of whom we genuinely lived in constant fear. It was to help me all the time I was living through the Nazi period.

  Yet again and again I realised that any small infringement of the rules could put me in mortal danger. There was shopping, for instance; Jews could go into shops only at a certain time late in the afternoon, when everything was already sold out. However, I often went there in the morning; after all, I had nothing else to do.

  Once, when I was strolling down Schmidstrasse with my Jewish star on display, carrying a net shopping-bag, a small, hunchbacked man with a sallow complexion came towards me. ‘Stop!’ he said, taking an official pass out of his pocket. ‘Ministry of Food! You must know that Jews aren’t allowed to go shopping except in the afternoon. I’m having you arrested!’

  That would have been disastrous, and I wasn’t holding anything useful – not even a bottle, or I could have cracked him over the head with it and then taken to my heels. My heart was racing. I took two or three steps back, so that he wouldn’t notice how agitated I was, and said, ‘I’m working shifts. I’m on the night shift.’

  ‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘Let’s see your identity card.’

  ‘I don’t have it on me.’

  ‘Then I’m arresting you.’

  Instinctively I let my knees give way a little, hunched my upper body and put back my head, so that I could look up at him. ‘Oh, it’s so kind of you to point that out! I didn’t think, I mean I never knew I had to have my identity card on me at all times. It’s really nice of you to tell me, because if I hadn’t met such a kind official I might really have been in trouble.’

  A conflict of feelings showed in the man’s expression: he didn’t know whether to be pleased or angry, spit at me or put his arm round me. He hesitated for a moment, then wagged an admonishing finger and said, ‘Well, you know now. So mind you have that identity card on you next time!’

  I had survived that encounter. Once again, I had been lucky. But I went straight home and made up my mind not to go about wearing the wretched star all the time any more.

  I knew where to find what we called the transit buildings. Using them in summer was no problem; if you wore a lightweight jacket with the star on it, you just disappeared into a corridor in one of these buildings, took off your jacket, and left the house by a different exit without it. In winter, of course, that didn’t work.

  My friend Irene Scherhey’s mother taught us how to sew on a star so that you could rip it off with a single movement, and then sew it on again at lightning speed later, using a ready-threaded needle hidden somewhere in the lining of your coat. From then on I walked around the area where I lived with the star duly displayed on my clothes, but loosely attached to them. Ten minutes later I was a free woman, without a star. On the way back I restored my appearance to suit the rules.

  Merely covering up the star could have terrible consequences. I witnessed such a scene in Neue Schönhauser Strasse. ‘Stop!’ two men in civilian clothes ordered an old man just a few steps ahead of me. Then I heard the click of handcuffs. The old man, who did look very Jewish, had neither ventured to go out without his star nor to wear it openly as the regulations required. Instead, he had been holding a briefcase pressed so close to his body that half the star was covered. That was reason enough to have him arrested and taken away.

  In the winter of 1941–1942 the threat of danger settled round my neck like a noose and kept tightening. Fear had me in its clutches. I wanted to save myself, but I had no idea how.

  I often had nothing to do all day. Then I would go all over the city, visiting even people I hardly knew to find out all that I could. I constantly heard bad news: someone had been taken away here, someone else had just had his deportation order there. I was so starving and desperate that I would do a little relaxation exercise in the stairway of a building before I rang the doorbell of whoever I was going to visit. If the door was opened I would say quickly, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t want to keep you, but I simply couldn’t pass by without looking in to ask how you are.’ Usually I had some entertaining bit of news ready, a little gossip to cheer up my intended host, and if I was in luck I would get a cup of ersatz coffee and a biscuit, or some other small thing to eat.

  One day I went into the Konditorei Dobrin. This café had once been among the smartest in Berlin. You went to Dobrin’s in Königstrasse after a shopping expedition on Saturday afternoon. There was still a branch of it, not quite so fashionable, on the Hackescher Markt; the customers there were now exclusively Jewish. I had heard that there was a little diversion to be found in this branch of the café, and you could get a cup of ersatz coffee for a few pfennigs.

  I went in alone, as indeed I went everywhere on my own. When I opened the door, I was looking at a room full of men in ski caps. I had a great dislike of that kind of headgear: its basic shape was like the SA cap, and at the same time it had
become part of the uniform of the now despised Jews. The earflaps of the cap could be tied up with a thin string like a kind of shoelace. With these little bows on top of them, the ski caps looked so silly that I felt like knocking them off the heads of the Jewish workers and crying, ‘Do something, why don’t you? Don’t go about in uniform, all of you wearing the same sheep’s clothing!’ Unfortunately they were no wolves in the sheep’s clothing, only the meekest of sheep.

  I sat down, ordered and drank my ersatz coffee. And suddenly I found myself in the grip of anger. I had a feeling that the Gestapo might march into this pigsty at any moment. The word ‘pigsty’ really did come into my head, and I looked at the floor in embarrassment – however, it was properly swept and polished. What I had noticed was not outward dirt, but the inner filth of this ersatz-coffee society.

  A man who had kept his ski cap on bellowed to another one, right across several tables, ‘Heard this one? There’s this apartment where a different Jewish family lives in each room, and there’s this twelve-year-old girl reading a book. So she asks her father, “Papa, what’s a comet?”

  “So Papa says, “A comet is a star with a long tail.”

  ‘Then the girl says, “Uncle Rosenthal in the next room is a comet.” ’*

  Roars of laughter. I felt nauseated. At that moment I decided that whatever happened to these people, it wasn’t going to happen to me. I wouldn’t go along with them.

  A man who didn’t wear a ski cap was sitting close to me. There was a hat hanging on the coat-stand near him. I said to him, ‘Do you mind my asking if that is your hat?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘That’s an odd question.’

  ‘May I ask you a favour? Would you escort me out of this café, just as far as the street?’