On the very first night I found Willi standing beside my bed. A weedy-looking man with a crumpled face, and in a nightshirt far too short for him, he indistinctly muttered a few revolting obscenities. You can guess the rest of it. I could neither kick up a fuss nor send him back, so I just let him have his way. But I felt sure that Tati knew what was going on.
I felt so embarrassed that I couldn’t look her in the eye.
The next night Willi appeared again, haunting the place like a nocturnal ghost. There were other reasons why I couldn’t stay any longer. Everyone in that apartment block had sharp ears, and there were any number of Nazis in it. On days of political celebration a sea of swastika banners hung there. Sooner or later I would have attracted attention.
I found someone else to help me. Because he was a Jew, Ernst Schindler, an old friend of my father’s, had been forced to retire ages ago. He was living in a mixed marriage with an Aryan wife in Gaudystrasse, in the north of Berlin. I had met him and the teacher Dr Max Bäcker a couple of times in the last few months. We had begun to learn Swedish together. It was Bäcker, a passionate advocate of the educational profession, and left in a wheelchair after the First World War, who said, ‘Do we really want to waste our time telling each other that the war is a disaster and the Nazis are criminals? Surely we have better things to do.’ Unfortunately we got no further than the third lesson.
Schindler, who himself lived in a very small apartment, found me a place to stay with a woman friend called Lotte in Karlstrasse.* In appearance at least this woman corresponded to the idea of an intellectual par excellence. She was in about her mid-forties, had her black hair cut like a man’s, and wore a pair of heavy horn-rimmed glasses. Lotte was of working-class origin, but had studied at further education classes, and had then been a secretary for the Social Democrat Party until 1933. ‘I will never in my life be a Nazi,’ she told me right at the start, ‘but I want no more to do with the Social Democrats either. Please don’t ask me any more about that.’ Otherwise she hardly spoke to me. I realised that she wanted to be left alone, and asked her for something to read.
She lived alone in two rooms, one leading to the other, in a cultivated apartment with bourgeois furnishings. Unfortunately the toilet was half a flight of steps lower down in the corridor of the building, and that was a terrible problem. I couldn’t leave the apartment to go to the toilet in the daytime.
Lotte went out early in the morning, and did not come back until late in the evening. I either had to leave the building with her and spend all day walking round the city – or stay in the apartment and keep perfectly quiet.
So Lotte asked me to get hold of a container in which I could put my stools. I couldn’t empty it until she was home. That was disgusting enough, but there was worse to come. I couldn’t find any such container. However, every few days I met Frau Koch in Köpenick. She regularly brought me legs of mutton that she got from an abattoir without ration coupons, handed me the cooked dish in a metal container with a lid, and I had to use the same container for toilet purposes.
Soon I couldn’t stand the sight of mutton. It nauseated me, but I had to eat the stuff cold, with a horrible sauce. My aversion to eating from the container in which I also transported my shit became so strong that I felt sick at the mere sight of it. However, of course, I had to thank Frau Koch effusively for the food intended for me. Once she brought me kohlrabi too, in the same metal pot. I couldn’t bring myself to eat any of it.
One Sunday Lotte took me with her on an excursion. We met a young married couple who were friends of hers at Bernau Station. I enjoyed getting to know them, for the young couple were very well read. We talked excitedly about all manner of things. At some point I mentioned Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. My landlady drew me aside and said, ‘You still have a lot to learn. The Augustins are neither Nazis nor anti-Nazis. They’re nice people, that’s all, so you should hold your tongue.’ In other words, I mustn’t draw attention to myself with remarks about Kant.
After some fourteen days Schindler found me my next place to stay. This time it was with his former cleaning lady. He himself had not been able to afford any household help for a long time, for he and his wife were living on the tiny salary she earned working in an office somewhere.
Ida Kahnke lived close to him, in Schönhauser Allee. Schindler knew that she was an anti-Nazi. The toothless old woman looked like a witch. The entire area round her mouth had caved in, and she had a prominent nose. In addition she was very thin – dried up, but not thin like a piece of string, flat like a bug.
As toilet attendant in a civil service office, she could use every extra pfennig that came her way. She chuckled happily when Schindler, who had no money himself, offered her ten marks to take me in for two weeks. But she made it clear that she would have done that even if no money was forthcoming. ‘When I was young I was a communist, but when you’re older you get religious,’ she often said. She was a Jehovah’s Witness, and they were banned at the time.
Ida Kahnke lived in the back part of what had once been a large and grand apartment. She really had only one room, the former kitchen, which was tiled and terribly uncomfortable. She had rented this room to a friendly young man. Unfortunately he stuttered and wet the bed. He dried his wet sheets in the room, and it made the whole apartment stink. Otherwise there was only a small servants’ room converted for use as a kitchen. Part of that room, again, was divided off as the toilet. The old woman slept in a kind of alcove in a back corner of the entrance hall, and I had perforce to share her big old wooden bed.
Her entire library was kept in the drawer of the kitchen table, and consisted of a few well-worn pamphlets prophesying the end of the world. I had nothing to do all day but sit in a decrepit wicker chair and leaf through these pamphlets. As the paper on which they were printed was filthy, I turned the pages with knitting needles.
I couldn’t move about freely. An invalid lived one floor below, and would have heard me at once. So I sat there idly, waiting for Frau Kahnke and munching the piece of bread that she left for me.
To make matters worse, Ida Kahnke’s brother Hugo was released from prison at just this time. He had served quite a long sentence for killing his wife, or perhaps the woman was his lover. Ida Kahnke was terribly afraid of him, telling me how he could burst in hopelessly drunk, demanding money, and so on. And he turned up just as she had described. I wished I were invisible, but he took no notice of me, and half an hour later he had gone again, because as soon as he got out of prison he had found himself a woman of some kind.
One weekend there was a birthday coffee party at Frau Kahnke’s. I sat inconspicuously in a corner, but found it fascinating. There were some men there, friends of Hugo’s, criminals by profession, and in addition a couple of Ida’s friends, devoutly bigoted members of the same sect. The common denominator, I noted inwardly, was that they were outsiders living a borderline life. They played ancient hit songs on an old gramophone with a horn and danced in the style of around 1900, waggling their hips. It was so grotesque that I pinched my arm and wondered if this was reality or a dream.
However, I also began thinking about social questions. After all, I was living in circumstances that I could never have dreamed of. It was clear to me that this horrid apartment was something perfectly normal, and quite a number of people lived like Ida Kahnke.
One day I was sitting in my wicker chair as usual, when the door suddenly opened and masculine footsteps approached. At first I took fright, thinking it was someone breaking in. But it turned out that the man, who was Bulgarian, lived in the same building, and had a key to this apartment because he had promised Frau Kahnke to decorate her kitchen. He had taken a day off work on the excuse of being sick and was here with a bucket of paint to surprise her.
He too was startled to see me. But he said at once, in broken German, ‘Housebreakers aren’t nice women like you.’ He was charming, and one thing soon led to another. By the time Ida Kahnke came home that afternoon, we were ready to te
ll her we were engaged. Dimitr Petrov Tchakalov – that was his name – was going to take me home to Bulgaria with him. We only had to find a way to get me there.
I was in love, indeed very much in love. He was a delightful man, with his gleaming black, thick hair, his dark eyes and his snow-white teeth. He often sang Bulgarian folksongs, rather sentimental ones, but in a very attractive voice. I really did want to go with him. Of course I didn’t tell anyone that I was secretly hatching a plan to go from Bulgaria over the border to Turkey, and then continue to make my way on foot to Palestine.
After two weeks, Frau Kahnke passed me on to another toilet attendant, a Frau Schulz in Lychener Strasse. Once again Schindler paid ten marks for me to go there, even though he was so impoverished himself. And once again I ended up in an almost identical wicker chair.
Frau Schulz worked all day, borrowed a lot of light literature from a lending library once a week, and let me have one of the books to read. She hardly ever spoke to me. A Frau Lauer, her former sister-in-law but now her deadly enemy, lived one flight of stairs down in the same building. On no account must this woman notice that I was staying in the apartment; that was the main problem.
But Frau Schulz had a good deal of experience, and she pointed out to me one day, ‘I see what’s up with you – you’ve got a little one on the way.’
She was right, and it couldn’t be ignored any longer. I had been suffering from morning sickness for weeks. I simply could not get down disgusting food like the mutton that Frau Koch brought me any more. I also knew who had made me pregnant. I hadn’t had anything to do with my Chinese fiancé for a long time, and I had only recently met the Bulgarian. The child’s father could only be Ernst Wolff.
The one person who could help me now was Dr Benno Heller. I had already heard a great deal about this Jewish gynaecologist. All the women who had been treated by him praised him highly. I had crossed his path once already, when I visited Toni Kirschstein in the Jewish Hospital after an operation.
Benno Heller had been to see her, and was about to leave the room when I arrived. With the utmost care, he put an expensive velours hat on his head, checking his appearance in the mirror above the washbasin. It was obvious that he was merely introducing himself by putting on that hat. What a vain show-off, I thought.
Heller had an Aryan wife, and for the time being his marriage shielded him from deportation. He practised in Braunauer Strasse* in Neukölln, as what was now called someone who ‘treated the sick’.
So that was where I went. Abortions were strictly forbidden. I couldn’t possibly ask him for one without gaining his confidence first. I reminded him of our meeting beside Toni Kirschstein’s sickbed, but he couldn’t remember it at all. He did say, ‘You could hardly make up something like that,’ but he was still suspicious; I could have been an informer. Rumour said that before 1933 he had already served a prison sentence for carrying out an illegal abortion. He was Jewish, and politically left-wing, so his situation was precarious. However, he wanted to help.
Finally he asked me to recite the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith.
‘Sh’ma Yisroel Adaunoi elauheinu Adaunoi echod† – hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,’ I recited.
‘All right, only a Jew knows that,’ decided Heller. He told me he would give me something to induce a miscarriage, but I must go through it on my own. No curettage would be necessary: ‘You’ll feel labour pains, and the whole thing will be expelled. You must throw it away, and that will be the end of it.’ He used the informal du pronoun to me, as he did with all his women patients.
So I set off on the long walk back to Lychener Strasse. When the pains began a few hours later, Frau Schulz gave me the key to a summerhouse that belonged to acquaintances of hers in Nordend, and told me just how to get there.
I went to the colony of summerhouses all on my own, unlocked the gate to the small property, found an old bucket somewhere in the garden and sat on it. After all that I had already experienced, now came this. But it was over quite quickly.
I hadn’t noticed that there was someone else in the garden, an old man who had shut himself in there because he was on his own. After the first shock he was very nice to me, said he saw what was happening and asked if he could help. Then he brought me some water to drink, and I asked him for newspaper so that I could wrap up the contents of the bucket and take them away. I went to Heller and asked him what I should do next.
‘Are you crazy, bringing that here?’ he asked, horrified. ‘Get rid of it where no one will find it.’ Frau Koch stepped in and helped me. I gave her the packet of newspaper, and she buried it under a plum tree.
I had no moral scruples. I wanted to live, so there was no option. But I was sad. It had clearly been a boy, the only descendant that the Wolff family would ever have had.
I did not even think, incidentally, of offering Benno Heller money, and he did not ask for any. He examined me briefly and said, ‘You’re all right. Off you go; your uterus has come to no harm.’
Mitko – the diminutive of Dimitr – knew about this unedifying episode and thought nothing of it. He was still planning to take a long holiday and go to his native country with me. I was still enthusiastic about the idea, and even persuaded Frau Koch to buy me a teach-yourself Bulgarian manual to study. I learned the language at top speed.
Soon I took to walking round Berlin again. If I wasn’t going to spend all day in the wicker chair, I left the apartment at the same time as my landlady, six or seven in the morning, and walked round all day. I had to do something. I came home, footsore, late in the evening. At that time I often thought to myself: if one could earn a home by walking the length and breadth of it, then I had earned the city of Berlin as my home.
Before leaving for Bulgaria, I had meant to say goodbye to several people whom I would probably never see again. Among them was Leo Davidsohn, a cousin of my mother’s. We had often spent Seder evenings at Aunt Grete’s with him and his family, but otherwise we did not have much contact with them. I remembered him from my childhood as a short, stout man who was always cracking feeble jokes.
As a young man Leo was said to have been very lively, a young fellow who always wore his boater tipped sideways on his head. But after some time his amusing little adventures came to an end. He was engaged to Gertrud Cohn, the ugly daughter of a very rich private banker. Shortly before the wedding, her father went bankrupt after an incident involving sharp practice, and shot himself through the head. Gertrud was going to give him his ring back, but Leo refused. ‘A human being is a human being as far as I’m concerned,’ he apparently said, ‘and you have suffered misfortune. I am a Jew and I don’t push other people into the abyss.’ The couple married, and so he had not a rich but a very sharp-witted wife at his side. She did all she could to build up a wholesale business in velvet fabrics, and it made their fortunes.
Leo was now a widower. His daughter was in Paris, and he was living with his two sisters from East Prussia, who kept house for him. This was the first time I had been to the enormous, grand apartment in Lietzenburger Strasse.
A housemaid asked me to wait for him in the wonderful hall. I looked carefully at everything: small rooms were divided off from it to left and right by velvet portières. I began pacing out that wonderfully comfortable room to measure it. If I survive, I decided, I’ll build myself a big villa with a hall that looks just like this. Then Uncle Leo appeared.
‘Are you going around without a star?’ was the first thing he asked, without even greeting me properly. He was visibly indignant.
‘Yes, I’m trying to survive. I came to say goodbye. I’m going on to see Recha Frankenstein,’ I replied. She was my mother’s favourite cousin, and had also been her closest friend.
‘You needn’t bother. She was taken away last week,’ he said bitterly. The pince-nez on his nose quivered. Leo was furious with me for coming to see him without my Jewish star. ‘You’re in the way,’ he said brusquely. ‘We don’t have time. My sisters are
busy making preparations for the transport we expect at any moment.’
‘Sorry. I won’t keep you long. I only wanted to say goodbye.’
‘What on earth are you thinking of, just not going when you’re told to?’
‘I’d like to survive.’
‘But if they catch you – do you know what they’ll do to you?’
‘What?’
‘They’ll deport you straight to the East.’
‘That’s what I want to avoid.’
At that moment he realised that he was going round in intellectual circles. He said, slightly mollified, out of sheer embarrassment, ‘I’ll be celebrating my seventieth birthday God knows where in Poland.’ There was a long pause, as he tried to find words. ‘No, celebrating isn’t right. I’ll be spending my birthday there.’ Then he quoted from the Pirkei Owaus – the Sayings of the Fathers. ‘Do not cut yourself off from the community.’ A moral sermon was the last thing I needed now.
‘Give my love to my aunts, and I hope you will manage as well as possible,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’ I was glad when I could close the door of the apartment behind me.
And then an idea leaped up at me like a stray mongrel dog. Uncle Leo was very well off; he couldn’t take his fortune to the grave with him. Whereas a hundred marks would have been a real help to me. But I was much too proud to ask him for money.
As I was going down the steps, the door of the apartment opened again up above. Leo called in a loud, carrying voice – he had been whispering to me in the hall of the house earlier – ‘Hello! I have something else to say to you, come back.’ I quickly ran up the few steps again.
‘Perhaps you’re doing the right thing after all,’ he said when I was facing him. ‘If you survive, and see my daughter Hilde again, then give her my love. I want her to know that my last thought will be of her. I will die with the Shema on my lips, and think of her.’ With that he slammed the door for the last time.
Underground in Berlin Page 10
