Thanks to the ink-erasing fluid I had bought, the original ink on the identity card could simply be removed. Koebner exchanged the photo of Hannchen Koch for one of me. Fräulein Henze copied the part of the official stamp that came above the photo, along with the eagle and the swastika, using a very fine brush. Everything else remained as it was: from now on I was Johanna Elisabeth Koch, née Guthmann. I was not entirely happy with this maiden name. More Guthmanns were Jewish than Aryan – but I had no real choice in the matter.
So now I had an identity card, but no passport and visa allowing me to travel, and no rail ticket. All these things were hard to procure in the middle of the war. Herbert Koebner therefore thought up a special ruse: he gave me a life as a freelance canteen manageress travelling at her own expense. I would not need a ticket issued by the Wehrmacht for that, and indeed I would not have got one, but I would seem to be vaguely connected with the Wehrmacht, and it was to be hoped that my documents would not be checked so closely.
Johanna Koch’s identity card with a photo of Marie Jalowicz. The stamp over the photograph was drawn in by hand and the date of birth forged.
The document he thought up for me was a travel order allegedly made out at a Luftwaffe air district command post in Warsaw. Fortunately that was a long way off. Such a document apparently issued in Berlin would have been far more easily checked to see if it was genuine. The son of a woman who was a neighbour of the Koebners, a young man of about my age, had been stationed at the Warsaw air district command post and stole the blank form there. His mother was a convinced supporter of the Resistance movement, and was later to save my life yet again.
It would have been simpler to travel by way of Poland, for that route led entirely through Nazi-occupied territory. I would not have needed a visa. But I couldn’t do it; I was panic-stricken at the thought. Passing a concentration camp in broad daylight, a place where my own people were being killed? It was a nightmarish idea.
So Koebner let me persuade him to devise another route by way of Vienna and Zagreb. With my heart in my mouth, I went to the Croatian embassy, situated in a villa with polished parquet floors in the elegant surroundings of Grunewald, to apply for a visa to pass through the country.
I did not have to wait long to show a member of the embassy staff my travel order as manufactured by Koebner, although it was obvious to the man at once that there was something wrong with it. First he looked sceptical, then he thought for a moment, and after that he began to roar with laughter. ‘Well, of course we’ll do it!’ he told me, with the air of someone anxious to please. I tried to keep my anxiety under control, and then I realised that he was more frightened of me than I was of him.
I don’t know what he really thought about me, but anyway, during this official transaction we both chuckled unconvincingly, as if we were acting in a silly farce. ‘Given that our countries are such close friends,’ he said emphatically more than once, ‘we’ll put a stamp on it.’ The Croatian coat of arms was a kind of chessboard, and the stamp looked very impressive.
The whole plan almost came to grief when I went to buy my ticket. The ticket clerk, a disobliging character, was suspicious. ‘You have a travel order? Then why hasn’t the Wehrmacht given you a ticket?’ he snapped. ‘There’s something fishy about this. I’ll have to get you arrested.’
‘I’m in a great hurry,’ I replied as calmly as possible, ‘but if you can’t give me a ticket now, then I’ll just have to wait until next week and get the passport and visa first. Heil Hitler!’ And I made off. Luckily he couldn’t leave his desk unattended and run after me.
I went to another station, where they made me out a ticket to Sofia with no more fuss than if I were buying a tram ticket from Schönhauser Allee to Pankow. The ticket clerk there couldn’t have cared less what my plans were. The money for the ticket was a present from Frau Koch’s boss, a former client of my father’s. He even gave me an extra hundred marks for the journey. I hid the banknote in the sole of my shoe for emergencies, and didn’t even tell Mitko about it.
*
The journey to Sofia took three days and three nights in all. Of course we went in the cheapest class, sitting on wooden benches, and it was a great strain. But I was not on my own. Mitko was with me, and we were newly in love. I was convinced that we were made for one another, not least because of the symmetry of our birth dates: I was born on 4/4/1922, and he was born on 5/5/1911.
We stopped off briefly in Vienna. My first impressions of the city disappointed me. I had expected something wonderful, imagining Vienna’s famous coffee houses and cake shops. But walking in the surroundings of the station, I found them as grey and dismal as any Berlin suburb. We had a cup of ersatz coffee in a cheap café, and then the journey went on.
When we finally arrived in Sofia the first thing that Mitko did was find us a hotel room. It was a cheap, shabby place, and he had to pay a lot for my papers not to be checked. He still had money; he had been working in Germany for two years – not as forced labour but voluntarily, as he reluctantly admitted. He really meant to use his savings from that time to buy a plot of land in Bulgaria, build a little house on it and get married. But now he was spending all his money on me, and it was rapidly dwindling.
On one of our first nights in this hotel there was a police raid, and all the guests had to show their papers. I had a fine for vagrancy imposed on me, and Mitko paid it at once. When he offered to pay a little extra to keep the case out of the records, the police officers agreed at once.
Sofia struck me as rather colourless. The city did not particularly impress me. One of our first visits was to a cousin of Mitko’s who ran a hairdressing salon with her husband. They lived in a large apartment building in the Mediterranean style, with long corridors and many tenants. Without understanding much of what they were saying, I heard Mitko talking to the couple excitedly, describing my situation and asking how my presence in Bulgaria could be legalised. He wanted to marry me, that much was certain.
His cousin and her husband were obviously upset to find that he was in a fix yet again, but they wanted to help, and told us that a writer who lived nearby was head of the communist Resistance. Presumably that last bit was something of an exaggeration.
This elderly gentleman, to whom we turned for advice, was called Christo Christov. He looked rather impoverished and down at heel, with gaps in his teeth and shabby clothes. There was much agitated conversation with him, too. After a while he asked to see my papers and have them translated. ‘It’s a miracle and a mercy that you got here with this rubbish,’ he commented. ‘These papers are useless. There are no Wehrmacht canteens here. You’d better bury the documents at the bottom of your bag, and don’t show them to anyone.’
But Christov did give us some good advice: Sofia, he said, was much too dangerous for us. We had better go to Tarnovo, where another cousin of Mitko’s lived.
Our journey through Bulgaria was a wonderful adventure for me. It was my first encounter with the strange, southern world of the Balkans. We took our time, seeing all the sights and staying in hotels here and there. I was fascinated by the climate, the flora and fauna, the food, and the way people sat together over meals. Every Bulgarian word and expression that I picked up made me happy. I didn’t worry much about anything, I just relied on Mitko, whose country this was. My plan of making my way towards Turkey retreated into the distance.
It was the vintage season, and we lived almost entirely on grapes. I ate them by the kilo, and that built up my strength again. After my experiences, after horrors like the mutton eaten from the container also used for my shit and other such unpleasant things, I was making an excellent recovery and getting my strength back.
In Tarnovo, the old imperial city of Bulgaria that clings picturesquely to a high rock, we saw the introduction of the Jewish star under pressure from the Germans. Or rather, I should say we saw the attempted introduction of the Jewish star. It was a curious and unique spectacle, resisted by the entire nation. I witnessed several street
scenes that deeply impressed me.
Once I saw three or four Jewish girls wearing the yellow star on their school uniforms as they walked through the streets. Their non-Jewish friends had formed a protective cordon round them. With heads held high, those girls looked aggressively into the face of every passer by, including me, as if to say, ‘If you dare to touch our friends we’ll strike you dead.’
On another occasion I observed a Jewish girl of ten or eleven walking by herself when a policeman abruptly beckoned her over. He grabbed the child, who went white as a sheet, tore the Jewish star off her, flung it to the road and trampled on it with both feet. As he did so, he was saying – and even I could understand him – ‘We don’t do that here! Bulgarians are not criminals.’
Within a few days that saying was in general circulation: ‘We Bulgarians are not criminals.’ An ancient man with a shepherd’s crook and a shaggy sheepskin asked us, ‘Where do I go to demonstrate against our fellows citizens being deported?’ All the former political parties protested, so did the lawyers’ association, the dentists’ association and the Church. It was magnificent. Only I, sadly, was barred from demonstrating against the Jewish star, which distressed me. But I was not in the country legally and must not attract attention, however much I wanted to protest.
Mitko’s cousin in Tarnovo was a realistic woman, and she asked us after a few days what our further plans were; we couldn’t be her guests for ever. She asked around to find out what could be done to make my stay legal, and chanced upon a lawyer who would do all kinds of crooked things for money. Mitko went to see him at once.
The man had seen us in the street. ‘You are here with this enchanting lady from Germany?’ he asked my lover. ‘I could use her as a governess for my little boy! The papers wouldn’t cost anything, if you take my meaning?’ He winked in a vulgar manner. Mitko, a naïve but decent character, was indignant at this improper suggestion. ‘We can do without your services,’ he said brusquely, and he stood up and left. ‘As you like,’ the lawyer called after him. ‘We’ll see what comes of this.’
It was he who denounced me. He must have told the police that I was illegally there in Bulgaria and suspected of spying for Russia. Next morning we found two Bulgarian police officers standing by our bed. I was abruptly torn away from an intense and delightful dream of flowery meadows – it was a rude awakening.
The uniformed officers spoke to us calmly and reasonably. ‘We’re sure you wouldn’t find it difficult to run away from us,’ they said, ‘but then we’d know that you’re guilty. We’re family men, so do us the favour of going to Sofia and reporting voluntarily to the authorities, or it’ll be we who pay for it.’ We looked at each other. It was obvious at once that we didn’t want to get other people into trouble.
My first experience of prison was a shabby hotel in Sofia. I was not allowed to leave the room, and was under police supervision. Down below, my lover Mitko, in floods of tears, stood under my window waving. We communicated through notes passed on for us by a cleaning lady, in return for a small tip.
Once in Sofia, Mitko had immediately gone to see Christo Christov. The old gentleman must have cursed to find himself involved in a case like mine. But he remembered that there was a man in Sofia responsible for the employment of Bulgarian workers in Germany. Hans Goll was regarded as a decent man and a firm opponent of the Gestapo. Through intermediaries, an arrangement for me to meet him was made.
I was collected from the hotel in a car, and Mitko, who was standing in the street, was allowed to come too. It was all very strange, like something out of a fairy tale. We were led into a large waiting room, and were soon called in to see Goll.
From the first, he addressed me in a pleasant tone of voice. He was prepared for my visit, but I couldn’t tell how much he knew about me. For a while he stared in silence at the documents I put in front of him. I asked him, openly, ‘Can you imagine someone who has never done any harm to another human being, who has never broken the law, let alone committed a bad crime, being in great danger?’
Marie Jalowicz with Dimitr Petrov Tchakalov in September 1942, in Sofia, Bulgaria.
‘I take your point,’ he replied. ‘I’ll try to help you.’
Mitko was in the room with us. He had done some interpreting on a transport of foreign workers, and at this wholly inappropriate moment began to ask for money for his services. He could communicate only in broken German, so it was clear that he had no real skill as an interpreter to offer. To make matters worse, he turned up his trouser leg, pushed down his sock and began scratching his shinbone very thoroughly. I could have sunk into the floor.
Hans Goll, a sandy-haired man with a redhead’s tendency to go crimson in the face easily, did so when he saw that and shouted, ‘Get out!’ When Mitko had left the room he said to me, rather more calmly, ‘I don’t think you should be in a relationship like that, it’s beneath you. But you are worth helping.’ He spoke to me as if I were a close relation.
Then he telephoned someone while I was still in the room. ‘Well, she doesn’t have proper papers, it’s a silly love affair – remember Viktor Koch and his little daughter?’ I heard him saying. I had no idea who this Koch was.* ‘Young people today do the silliest things when they’re in love,’ he went on. Then he put his hand over the receiver and breathed a word to me, probably ‘Gauleiter’.
Hans Goll, aged thirty-four in Sofia in 1942. Goll was responsible for Bulgarian workers coming to Germany. (photo credit 3.2)
After he had hung up, I said anxiously, ‘It’s my married name that’s Koch, at least in my papers – so my father can’t be called Koch, can he?’
‘Oh, my God, how naïve you are,’ he said. ‘It’s not a question of checking your papers. The whole point is to act from the first in such a way that no one asks about them.’
Then he sent me out. I sat down beside my unfortunate lover Mitko. It was odd, but at that moment I felt, for the first time, that Goll was right. There was no future in my relationship with Mitko. It had been a really enchanting, spring-like love affair, but a flash in the pan. Now it was burning out, and soon there would be nothing left of it but a little heap of ashes.
After some time Goll called me into his room again. ‘Go back to the hotel,’ he said, ‘but you can go as a free woman. Walk about all you like. Tomorrow or the day after I’ll pick you up in a car. You will get a genuine German passport on trust. It will stand up to any amount of checking, but it will be marked Valid for Return to Germany Only.’
He also explained the course that this return journey was to take: I would go by ship from Lom on the Danube to Vienna, by way of Budapest. He would discover in good time whether there was a warrant out for my arrest in Germany. If there was, he would send me a telegram to the ship containing some innocuous message. ‘If you get a telegram, never mind what it says, leave the ship in Budapest. Pick up a shopping basket, wait around by the shipboard galley, and leave the ship with the crew.’ He gave me a sealed envelope. ‘Open this only if you have to disembark in Budapest, and go to the address you will find inside. They will help you there. If you don’t receive a telegram, stay on board and burn this envelope. Give me your word of honour that you will.’
I promised, solemnly assuring him that I was absolutely reliable. One or two days later he drove me to the German embassy in Sofia. Once again I had to wait while he disappeared into the back rooms. When he came out, he said in a loud voice, ‘Having known your family for so many years, I’ve been able to guarantee your identity as Johanna Koch. Get your marriage certificate in order, and then you can legally come back to Bulgaria. But for now my office will pay your passage back to Germany. Good luck, and I hope we meet again.’ I didn’t even have a chance to thank him properly.
I was given my passport by a very nice young woman who volubly wished me luck and all good fortune. She herself was married to a Bulgarian, she told me, and he was a wonderful man. She hoped I would succeed in marrying my own Bulgarian fiancé. As she talked, she caressed both my
arms.
*
Mitko went as far as Lom with me. Once again we stayed in a hotel there and ate the excellent Bulgarian grapes. Once again Mitko was my lover, a delicately built man with fairy-tale colouring, white as snow, red as blood and black as ebony, and with an enchantingly mellifluous voice. But now I clearly felt how different we were. He often sang a German hit song that was all the rage on the radio in Berlin, a terribly sentimental piece – and when it turned out that he had misquoted the line Schenk mir dein Löchlein, Maria, substituting Löchlein [little hole] for Lächeln [smile], I finally realised that yes, it had been a nice love affair, but it was just as well that it was over now.
After one or two days in Lom, Mitko asked me to understand that he couldn’t stay any longer. He had been in Bulgaria for weeks, he said, and hadn’t yet even been in touch with his parents. He was going back to his village, but he left me all the money he still had. It was a tearful farewell. We embraced, wept together, and encouraged each other to hope that we would meet again some day. But we never did.
Lom was a miserable place. If there were any sights worth seeing there, I didn’t discover them. And once Mitko had left, there was no one to show them to me.
All the same, I tried to delay my journey. Every day that I didn’t spend in Berlin, I thought, was another day in safety, a day closer to the end of the war. I thought up all kinds of reasons why I had to stay in Bulgaria. The man organising shipments from Lom was German. He sat at a little table in the street, drawing up passenger lists. I offered to certify that I hadn’t yet finished a course of medical treatment. I said I had to wait for a date to appear in a law court. None of it was any good. ‘You’re being thrown out,’ he said abruptly. ‘That’s what it says in your passport.’
Before giving up I made one last try. ‘Then I’ll have to leave without my winter coat, what a nuisance! I left it in Tarnovo,’ I said miserably. ‘They were going to send it on here in a parcel.’ That did work. The man began shaking dramatically, a facetious imitation of someone shuddering with cold. It was mid-October, and he obviously regarded Prussia as something like East Siberia. ‘Prussia without a winter coat?’ he said. ‘Dear me, that won’t do. You can stay here another ten days.’ He crossed my name off one list and put it on another.
Underground in Berlin Page 12
