Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  The mood was very different when I went to see Helene Gutherz the doctor. She lived in Augsburger Strasse with her husband David, a lawyer from Austria. When I told them that I had escaped arrest they both rejoiced. ‘Marie, make tea, the good tea that we keep for special occasions. This is a very happy one,’ Helene Gutherz shouted to the maid in the kitchen. She and her husband hardly knew how to express their delight. Finally they decided to give me a picture that a friend of theirs had painted; green horses in a meadow. I didn’t think it was particularly good. ‘I don’t have a roof over my head – where could I put it?’ I objected. Thereupon they tried to give me their dining-room furniture. It was grotesque. ‘We spent more than we could afford on it, we didn’t have much money,’ said Helene Gutherz. Her husband opened the doors of the sideboard and knocked them. ‘Hear what good, solid wood that is?’ I admired the first-class quality, but had the greatest difficulty in getting them to realise that I could do nothing with the furniture. Where on earth was I supposed to keep it?

  After fervent embraces, blessings and wishes for good luck, we finally parted. I felt not a trace of hatred, envy or aggression in either of them, but I was relieved when I was outside. It had been such a pointless battle against being given the contents of a dining room.

  Then I still had many hours to kill, and I sat in the shelter of a tram stop to rest. While I was there an idea occurred to me, and it shook me badly: something had just come to an end. These had been my last visits to Jewish friends and relations. They were going one way, I was turning in a very different direction.

  My last meeting with Ernst Wolff in August 1942 was terrible. His family, too, had ‘the lists’ ready. These lists had to be drawn up a few days before your planned deportation, and summed up all your worldly goods. I was sick of the sound of the word: everyone was making ‘lists’. I couldn’t bear the fear of the crime that threatened them all, and the strange sense of industry that it induced in them.

  There was something of the military man in Ernst, and he told me that he had had the huge dining table where the Seder feasts were normally held extended. The rucksacks for his parents, his aunt and his sister Thea were packed on it, and he had his elderly relations doing exercises. ‘Pick up rucksack!’ ‘Put down rucksack!’ and so on. He used a terrible word when he told me about it; he spoke of the ‘journey’ that they would all be taking. A journey, he called it.

  At this last meeting, the atmosphere between us was very tense. I walked down Memhardstrasse and Münzstrasse with him, in mortal fear. He was wearing the Jewish star and I, of course, was not. It was torment.

  ‘Which of us is going the better way we must wait and see; who will live and who will not,’ he said. I refrained from running through my arguments again. However, raising his forefinger, he gave me some moral precepts to take with me: I was of a good Jewish family and must not forget myself. I had had enough; I didn’t want to hear any more.

  We were on the way to see his cousin Herbert Koebner. The former director of a dental clinic, Koebner had now specialised in forging documents. Ernst Wolff wanted us to meet.

  Ernst and I said goodbye to each other in Koebner’s apartment in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, hoping we might meet again. It was a banal farewell – how could it have been anything else?

  4

  My aunt Sylvia Asarch had once lived on the estate of Boldera near Riga, and so she had a Soviet passport, which for the time being protected her from deportation. In the summer of 1942, she was the only member of my mother’s family with whom I was still in touch. All the rest had fled from Germany, had been deported or were already dead.

  We often sat drinking tea together. Of course I told Sylvia about Mitko and my plans to go away with him.

  ‘What?’ she asked, horrified. ‘A working man without any education? You should marry a rich man so that you can live in the right style for your station in life!’

  Of course, this was grotesque. Sylvia herself knew how upset the family had been when she took a non-Jewish lover who was also from the working class. Otto Starke was in fact an extremely nice man. Long after they had separated, well into the war, he was still regularly sending Sylvia parcels.

  Sylvia had fled from the Russian revolution in 1917 without her children, arriving in Berlin with a single piece of luggage, a box containing several very expensive Parisian hats. From then on the family had regarded her as an uncaring mother who had sacrificed her children to save her hats. Only now did she tell me the real story. The Bolsheviks had stormed in at the front of the manor house, while she slipped out of the back of it at the last moment, disguised as a peasant woman. If she had shown that she was mistress of this estate, she had reasoned, they would all be killed; they’d be regarded as kulaks and shot. However, she thought that if she left her children behind the Soviets would spare their lives and send them to an orphanage, where they would get enough to eat, be brought up as communists, and would then have to make their own way in the world. Her great secret was that she still had a photograph of her four adolescent children, Tassja, Bruno, Ruth and Fila. She once showed it to me.

  Sylvia was rather small and plump, with a large behind. She considered herself beautiful and a person of great consequence. Indeed, every step she took proclaimed: important, important, important. A salient feature of her face was her large nose with its wide pores. She loved to use heavy make-up, painting her lips bright cherry red, and covering her whole face with shimmering powder in a slightly lilac tone.

  Her craving to stand out contrasted oddly with the fact that only help from the family enabled her to live in Berlin for so many years. Once, when Aunt Mia bought herself an expensive tailored suit and showed it off, twirling in front of us, we all admired it except for Sylvia, who said, ‘Well, not bad, but the best tailor in St Petersburg would have done it better.’

  She herself once bought a length of silk that had been used to decorate the display window of a furniture store. She had this badly faded but expensive fabric dyed dark purple and made into a very extravagant set of matching garments: a dress and jacket, a cape and a scarf. People turned to look at her in the street when she wore it, because of her striking appearance.

  Once Sylvia stayed with us in Prenzlauer Strasse for a few weeks. She was going to make herself useful by baking something, and my mother suggested a cake in a circular ring mould, telling her the ingredients: half a kilo of flour, about a hundred grams of butter and four eggs.

  ‘What?’ cried Sylvia. ‘Four eggs? My God, what a mean little recipe!’ A cake as she made it, she said, began with a batter consisting of the yolks of thirty-six hard-boiled eggs pounded.

  My mother lost her temper when Sylvia put on such airs. ‘What a bloodsucker you are!’ she said angrily. Thereupon Sylvia left the apartment, slamming the door and without her coat, although it was winter. We worried about her, but she was back an hour later.

  In the early Nazi period, Sylvia planned to leave Germany and move in with her brother Max in London. However, apparently his wife Bobby harassed, insulted and exploited her so much that she returned to Berlin a few months later. By a dispensation of Providence she even got back her old furnished room with two ancient old ladies in Wilmersdorf.

  Among the absurdities of the war years was the fact that Sylvia finally got a proper paid job. She was employed by a half-Jewish man called Hofer who was a silversmith, and ran a workshop making costume jewellery, which was very popular at the time. You could bring him an old silver spoon or something similar, and he would make it into a pendant or a bracelet. There was nothing of the kind to be bought in the shops.

  Sylvia did all the office work in this business. Her boss was living with a lady whom he couldn’t marry because she was fully Aryan. Once, when I visited Sylvia in the silversmith’s workshop, she introduced me to this lady – or rather, introduced us the other way round. ‘I’m so glad that I can introduce our Fräulein Richold to you,’ she told me. Elisabeth Richold was old enough to be my mother, so I should hav
e been introduced to her. She was a full-bosomed, very attractive woman. The expression on her face slipped briefly, but she tried not to let it show.

  When we were alone I asked Sylvia, ‘How could you do a thing like that? Introducing a much older woman to me as if she were a servant.’

  ‘Well, and is she anyone in particular?’ replied Sylvia. This was one of her favourite phrases, indicating that the person addressed was not in fact anyone in particular.

  That summer of 1942, Sylvia concentrated all the love she had no longer been able to give her four children on me. She became central to my life, making visits on which I could no longer venture. For instance, she went to see Toni Kirschstein to tell her that I had disappeared. And somewhere in a winding street she found a dusty little stationery shop which still sold something very important to me: ink-erasing fluid, which had been taken off the market long ago and was strictly forbidden because it could be used in forging documents. But the saleswoman didn’t know that, and was glad to get rid of her old stock at last.

  Sylvia Asarch with her husband Boris Asarch, pre-1914.

  When we were drinking tea together one day, Sylvia got to her feet and announced, ‘I am going to tell you something that will astonish you, and you mustn’t forget it. I’ve lost everything, I have that terrible flight behind me, and I have never seen my children again. But I know one thing very well, and it’s the sum of my experience of life: the Bolsheviks were right.’ That has influenced me for the rest of my life.

  My plan to go to Bulgaria set Sylvia thinking along her own characteristic lines. ‘You need a first-class trousseau,’ she said. ‘You can’t go without an evening dress. Pea-green silk would be nice.’

  She planned to embark on a major business deal to provide this trousseau. She had a friend who was also Bulgarian, one Herr Todorov who lived in the same building and worked in a tobacconist’s. At a guess, the man was seventy, and I couldn’t help noticing that she was in love with him. She herself was around sixty, but still had an erotic and very passionate nature.

  She gave all she had to the charming Herr Todorov. Doing small deals – getting hold of ten cigarettes somewhere and selling them on at a few pfennigs more – was not in Sylvia’s style. She wanted to bring off a really big coup, and it led to her being handed over to the authorities by the man concerned.

  I heard about it because Sylvia had arranged for me to talk to Herr Todorov. We were to meet at a certain bench in the Tiergarten. She was sure that it would be extremely useful to me to discuss life in Bulgaria with an educated and well-to-do Bulgarian.

  He was to be carrying a sign by which I could recognise him, but that wasn’t necessary. I knew who he was before he reached me. He looked exactly as I had imagined him from Sylvia’s description: a very good-looking, white-haired gentleman entirely clad in pale grey. He was obviously a shady character. Poor Sylvia, I thought, she’s fallen for a Lothario.

  And even from a distance I saw how the corners of his mouth turned down in disappointment. I was not his sort of woman. My poverty was obvious, and I was shabbily dressed.

  We exchanged a few civilities, and then he said, in a strong Slav accent, ‘Asarch is locked up.’

  Locked up? I gaped stupidly at him and asked, ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Is locked up,’ he repeated.

  He must have denounced her, thereby ridding himself of her, one or two days after she had given him all her money. I was to go to his house with him, he said, and he would give me a piece of bread. Feeling dazed, I followed him to Schaperstrasse. He kept me waiting in the doorway of his room. Opposite the door stood his desk with its drawer open, and I saw Sylvia’s ring inside it. I liked that ring very much, and had often admired it: it was so large that it spread above the lowest joint of her middle finger, and was very beautifully made, with a setting of tiny birds pecking at jewelled splinters. If only because of its filigree craftsmanship, the ring was very valuable.

  My last doubts were gone. He had even cleared out her apartment. With an idiotic grin, he turned to me and closed the desk drawer with his behind. Then he gave me a piece of bread. It was so hard that Ida Kahnke and I worked away at it with hammer and chisel, and still we couldn’t cut it up small. Although it was all so terrible, we laughed until we cried.

  In addition Herr Todorov gave me two pairs of knitted stockings. The thick material would never fit smoothly, but ‘absorbed water’, as people said, meaning that they got wrinkles in them. Poor as I was, I couldn’t wear such things. I gave them to Ida Kahnke. ‘To think there are still knitted stockings!’ Delighted, she burst into fits of bleating, old-lady laughter.

  Next day I went first to the silversmith’s workshop where Sylvia had worked. I told Elisabeth Richold what had happened.

  ‘How could she do such a thing?’ she sighed. ‘A Soviet Jewish lady dealing with a profiteer like that?’ After Sylvia’s arrest the jewellery workshop had also been searched.

  ‘She didn’t do it for herself,’ I said. ‘She did it for me.’

  Frau Richold burst into tears. ‘I’m glad you told me that. Sylvia Asarch is rather eccentric, but this shows her in a very different light. I didn’t know she was such a good person.’

  I never saw Aunt Sylvia again. Many years after the war I happened to be in company where people were discussing Hofer the silversmith’s workshop. One of the women present said, ‘And would you believe it, there was a Soviet Jewish woman called Sylvia, she’d been enviably well protected, but she was so greedy and stupid that she tried dealing with crooks, and that was the end of her.’

  I didn’t mention the relationship, but asked, ‘Did the lady survive?’

  ‘No. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it’s said that she was shot.’

  5

  There was a strange atmosphere on the railway platform in Zagreb. I walked uneasily up and down, waiting for the storm to break. A curiously ominous wall of purple cloud hung over the station, but when I turned round I looked up at a bright blue summer sky.

  Then torrents of rain fell. A few moments later a double rainbow stretched in front of the dark clouds, shining in glorious colours such as I had never seen before. I felt a deep sense of gratitude, and put up a silent prayer. ‘Thank you for this sign, dear God. The rainbow is a sign of your covenant in the Bible, so you are keeping the covenant with me – which means that I shall live.’

  Would I reach my journey’s end? Could I succeed in crossing Bulgaria and Turkey and reaching freedom? It was a question that I had asked myself again and again recently. I was in a state of great nervous tension. The train had kept stopping on the way along the line, we kept having to get out, and when we did reach the next station we had often missed our connection. We were now in Croatia, and I felt very queasy in a country subjugated by the Nazis. I had heard that the fascist Ustaše there were even worse than the SS. I would rather not have got out of the train at all in the Croatian capital, but it felt good to stretch my legs. A little girl of about six danced round us, reaching out her thin arms and begging. We got back into the train, and a few minutes later it moved away towards Sofia.

  It was now the middle of September 1942. In my last weeks in Berlin I had been busy getting together the papers I needed for this journey. I began by approaching Herbert Koebner, who created or got hold of the documents needed for escaping from Germany. I knew his son Heinz slightly; he conducted the choir in the Old Synagogue, so I had often seen his face in the pattern, so to speak, cast by the grille behind which the choir sang. He was engaged to a very pretty graphic artist, who lived with the Koebners. Her blonde curls didn’t quite go with her complexion and her brown eyes. She had already gone underground (her name was allegedly Fräulein Henze), and she worked on the practical and technical side of the forgery business, paying great attention to detail.

  Ernst Wolff had told me that his cousin needed a highly intelligent and reliable person to act as a test case for his forgeries, and in return would not take any money from me. I felt
greatly flattered, and believed him. I discovered the truth about this bargain only much later.

  First, however, I had to have documents on which Koebner could work. Hannchen Koch immediately offered to get hold of what was needed. She worked in the office of a co-operative laundry which had a great many customers coming and going, and she stole an identity card from the pocket of a coat hanging up in the corridor there.

  By chance the name of the woman it belonged to was Abraham, née Hirsch. Presumably she could prove that she was of pure Aryan descent, but both her surnames sounded decidedly Jewish. Frau Koch immediately realised that I couldn’t use an identity card that would arouse suspicion. ‘It’s a judgement from God,’ she announced. ‘You mustn’t go under the name of Hirsch or Abraham or Schulze, you’d better have my papers. If I’m ever in a situation where I have to show my identity card, I’ll only just have discovered that I’ve lost it.’ For herself, she got what was known as a postal identity card, a substitute which meant that only the postman had to vouch for her identity.*

  She had suffered pangs of conscience in abstracting a stranger’s identity card. It was even harder for her to play the part of the honest finder now, and restore the document to its overjoyed owner. She claimed to have found it on a heap of coal in the yard of the laundry, and made a great fuss over accepting a generous sum of money as the reward.

  However, I had another problem with Frau Koch’s papers: she had been born in 1905, and so she was seventeen years older than me. I, on the other hand, barely looked my real age of twenty. Indeed, I was often taken for seventeen and asked whether I was still at school. All that Koebner could do to tone down this discrepancy a little was to make the figure 0 in the date 1905 into a figure 1. That would make me twenty-seven years old, which still was not very likely.