Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  So I had gained a little time, but I didn’t know what to do with it. Since I had no occupation, I just wandered round the place. As I did so I noticed a large group of Greek men who looked lost and impoverished, and were probably foreign workers bound for Germany.

  Once an elderly Hungarian officer spoke to me. ‘You speak German? May I invite you to take a glass of wine with me?’ I accepted the invitation, and soon regretted it, because he was dreadfully arrogant. We drank wine together for five or six evenings running. He was always making remarks such as, ‘Asia begins beyond Budapest.’ He was also a traditional anti-Semite, well informed about the military situation. He told me, ‘We shall win, you know. But I’m aware how hard it will really be; I expect a catastrophe.’

  I could no longer restrain myself. I answered in such a loud voice that people at the nearby tables turned to look at us. ‘I don’t expect any catastrophe. I’m firmly convinced that the just cause will win.’

  He looked at me foolishly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Are you in any doubt of what the just cause is? Do you need such things explained to you?’ I retorted defiantly.

  To that, he said, ‘Something about you strikes me as odd. The extent of your education compared to your financial means, your putting up here in the cheapest accommodation and your generally poor appearance – none of it really fits together.’

  I told him some story about a large suitcase that had gone astray. Once again I had been taught a lesson: I must be more careful. This man could have been dangerous to me. Fortunately he was leaving next day.

  At the end of October I left Lom on the ship. Because it had got around that I spoke some Bulgarian, I was asked to interpret. There were many Bulgarians on board who didn’t speak a word of German. It was only a case of giving them simple instructions such as where to go on the ship. But I was proud that I could make myself useful.

  A woman who was one of the organisers told the man in charge of this transport about me, and he wanted us to meet. He sat beside me on a bench on deck. It was fine weather, and we saw the landscape passing by. He was bored, hoped to get some amusement from our conversation, and kept laughing cheerfully. Then he asked why, as a citizen of the German Reich, I was being sent back from Bulgaria. I told him the usual story – I had been planning to marry a Bulgarian, but had left Germany in too much of a hurry and without the necessary papers.

  ‘Would you be kind enough to show me your papers?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never seen a passport in which a German citizen is obliged to leave the country, although there is a guarantee of her identity.’ Naturally I was alarmed. I opened my bag, meaning to show him my identity card first, but I found that I had my passport in my hand. I noticed my mistake too late. Put the passport back in the bag and take out the identity card? That would have looked suspicious.

  Temporary passport for ‘Johanna Koch’ to enter Germany, made out on 9 October 1942 at the German embassy in Sofia. Comment in the passport: ‘The holder of this passport has not proved her citizenship of the Reich. It is valid only for her

  The man produced a magnifying glass and inspected my passport closely. Then he gave it back to me. ‘There, now we can be comfortable together. Your passport is fine. So far as I’m concerned it could say anything, for instance If my aunt had wheels she’d be an omnibus, or –’ he was looking for something equally silly, and I supplied it: ‘Or There’s a funfair on in Heaven.’

  ‘Yes, just so long as the stamp on the passport photo is genuine,’ he went on. ‘You see, I’ve recently been on a course showing us how to recognise forged papers. After that we were able to unmask several Yugoslavian partisans with apparently faultless German papers. They spoke good German, and only one little thing in their papers was wrong: the edges of the official stamp were forged.’ He pointed to the bank of the river. ‘Look over there: we strung up those partisans on meat hooks a little farther on inside that forest.’

  I was shocked and upset, and had the greatest difficulty in hiding it. If I had handed him my identity card he would have seen at once that it was forged, and that would have meant my certain death.

  return to Germany by the Danube route.’ On the right-hand side, the stamps document her journey out of Bulgaria from Lom on 31 October 1942, and her arrival in Vienna on 4 November 1942.

  He went on to tell me about other Slavs who had forged papers and spoke excellent German, but could not pronounce the letter H. I immediately thought of my Russian grandmother, who was said to have called her son ‘Gerbert’ and her son-in-law ‘Germann’. And then I fell victim to a strange phenomenon: for a few hours I myself couldn’t pronounce an H. I had to steer a course around any word with H in it, like ‘heaven’, or think of an alternative. Such was the absurd result of the mortal fear that, once more, I had survived.

  I was very glad when we had left Budapest behind us. The outline of the city rooftops, considered so beautiful, did not appeal to me at all. I associated Budapest with the appalling Hungarian officer who had drunk wine with me in Lom. Until we reached the Hungarian capital, moreover, I was waiting in great suspense for a telegram from Goll. He had assured me that he would be told exactly when I was travelling, and had asked me not on any account to get in touch with him on my own initiative.

  I spent the last part of the river voyage on deck in fine weather, talking to the workers who, like me, were going on to Vienna. One of them had a copper ashtray with him. I borrowed it for a moment on some excuse, took it into the toilet and burned Goll’s unopened letter, with a certain sense of personal pride: I was not such a moral wreck as to break my word out of mere curiosity. I threw the ashes away and gave the man his ashtray back.

  We reached Vienna that evening. The ship emptied, and a long line formed on the quayside. After we had gone through the first passport control, I asked the man in charge of the transport, who was standing next to me in the queue, ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Everyone has to be checked by the Gestapo men in Morinplatz. You too because of that unusual passport. So stand in line here with the rest of us.’

  It was a long way, and the column of weary figures weighed down by their packs moved slowly. As we passed a railway station, I suddenly had an idea. I went into the ticket office, handed in my case at Left Luggage, and rejoined the queue a little later. I felt more mobile and could move more freely now.

  On reaching Morinplatz, we were accommodated in a huge concourse full of camp beds and straw mattresses. It was a terrible night. I couldn’t get a wink of sleep, terrified as I was of what might happen next. That meant, of course, that I was exhausted in the morning, when we would all be called up for the Gestapo to check our papers. We had to wait for hours.

  When my turn came, I forced myself to go into the Gestapo office in total control of myself. ‘Wait here,’ someone told me in a heavy Viennese accent, offering me a chair. He said he had to telephone and find out whether my personal details and my address were right. After he had gone out, I heard him talking behind the closed door. He was obviously calling the police station responsible for Nitzwalder Strasse in Berlin.

  A few minutes later he came back, beaming. ‘Yes, all in order: identity card number, address, maiden name and date of birth.’ I felt enormously relieved. No one had noticed the forged date of birth, 1915. That obvious discrepancy could have been the death of me.

  ‘Can I go now?’ I asked, casually. ‘I have to do a few things in Vienna before I go on to Berlin.’

  ‘Not yet, I have to ask you to wait. We still have to speak to police HQ in Berlin.’

  ‘I see. Will it take long?’

  ‘Well, right now I don’t have the time to make the phone call, so it could be quite a while.’

  I asked him where the toilet was. My body was reacting violently to all this upheaval, and I suddenly felt unable to stay in the building a moment longer. In the toilet I took my hundred-mark note out of my shoe. Then I looked out of the window. Two German soldiers were on guard only a fe
w metres away. Within seconds I had an idea.

  ‘Hey, you fine gents, run after them! Those bloody Balkan guys stole my case! Look, there they go!’ I shouted at the soldiers.

  ‘Can’t be done, we’re on guard, we have to stay put.’

  ‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’

  ‘On guard means on guard!’

  ‘Then help me out of this window! I’ll have to go after them myself,’ I snapped furiously. The two young soldiers helped me out of the window like the good boys they were, and I chased after the supposed thieves.

  After that everything happened very fast. At the next street corner I asked someone the way to the railway station. Soon after that a tram came along, I got on it, and was at the station within a few minutes. I quickly went over to the Left Luggage counter, where I got my case back without any difficulty. Then to the ticket office, where I bought my ticket. No problem with passport checks either; Vienna was in the Ostmark area. I asked when the next train for Berlin left.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I was told. ‘Up those steps, you can take your time. You have five minutes.’ It was pure chance that a connection to Berlin ran from Franz Joseph Station in Vienna, and at that very moment too.

  I found myself in a compartment with a nice bunch of young Austrian soldiers as my travelling companions. When I asked them to lift my case up to the luggage net, they laughed themselves silly at my Berlin accent. Then they brought out a wonderful rustic loaf, sliced it, spread the slices with butter, topped them with cheese and sausage and invited me to share their meal. I certainly didn’t go hungry on that journey.

  And so, on the morning of 6 November 1942, I was back in the city of Berlin that I had left seven weeks earlier.

  * Translator’s note: The German noun has three distinct meanings: brightness, appearance, and a piece of paper.

  * Translator’s note: The Berlin fire service was subsumed by the police during the hostilities.

  * Today Reinhardtstrasse.

  * Now Sonnenallee.

  † The Hebrew translation is written in the way German Jews in Berlin traditionally pronounced it.

  * In a talk that Marie Simon gave in 1993 she described the way to get a postal identity card: ‘Many Jewish women who had gone underground could account for themselves legitimately at any time, and without arousing suspicion, by showing a postal identity card – a genuine identity card made out in a false, non-Jewish name. This is how it worked: Mirjam Cohn regularly wrote herself letters to the same address, sent to Marta Müller care of Schmidt … She looked out for the postman, asking him to take her letter, chatted him up a little, offering him a cigarette, and after a certain time she would ask the postman to tell them at the post office, for the purpose of making out an identity card, that yes, he knew Marta Müller personally. At this point a packet of cigarettes changed hands. I don’t know of any case where a postman refused to do a nice woman this small service.’

  * Probably Heinz Koch (1894–1959), visiting professor at Sofia University in 1940 and director of the entire educational system of the city.

  FOUR

  The enemy is doing all this to us

  The First Winter in Hiding

  1

  Early in the evening we all met at the Koebners’ apartment in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse. Once again I noticed the vanity of Benno Heller, the gynaecologist, not to mention the great care that he devoted to his wardrobe. When he took off his scarf and gloves, he put them down so that everyone could see they came from an expensive sports shop on the Kurfürstendamm.

  We sat down at the large, handsome dining table, and Frau Koebner made herbal tea. I had asked for this meeting soon after my return in November 1942, and it was at my suggestion that Heller was also there. For he, too, had turned to Koebner’s forgery workshop; he wanted to get out of Germany, and that could be done only with forged papers. I wanted to warn the men against making any more use of the blank forms from the Warsaw air district command post. Judging by my recent experience, it seemed that they would do no one any good now.

  Hannchen Koch spoke first; I had spent the first night after my return with her. While her husband was on shift duty at the police station, I had slept soundly in the Kochs’ marital bed for almost twenty-four hours. Hannchen had decided to keep Emil out of my affairs in future. ‘I will see to it that you’re safe on my own. I’ll make all the necessary sacrifices,’ she had told me, as usual rather too emotionally.

  Now, shyly and quietly, Frau Koch made some remarks mingling, in wild confusion, all she knew about magic, mysticism, the occult and the interpretation of dreams. She told us that she was trying to influence the political situation by damaging Hitler’s astral body. I felt that this was incredibly embarrassing, but everyone kept a straight face. After a few minutes I reached over the table to take her arm and said, I’m afraid in far too loud a voice, ‘Hannchen, that’s wonderful.’

  At the same moment the shrill sound of the doorbell was heard. We were all terribly alarmed. Who could be at the door?

  Then we all set to work very fast. While Frau Koebner went to answer the door, her husband and son cleared the living room. The table and chairs were pushed aside, the rug rolled up. Someone wound the gramophone, put on a record, and immediately music began to play. We were staging a dancing party. With an elegant bow, Heller invited Frau Koch to dance, while the gramophone belted out an old hit song with a catchy rhythm. I’d like to be the lodger in Miss Liesbeth’s downstairs room, For I’m a merry dodger, we’d have such fun – zing boom!

  The music carried me away: Fritz Koebner, one of the sons of the family, had led me out on the improvised dance floor. His elder brother Heinz and Heinz’s fiancée were not there. I saw Frau Koch closing her eyes. In spite of all the anxiety and alarms, she looked ecstatic dancing with her dream-doctor, who looked exactly the part of a film star playing a gynaecologist in a sentimental romance. Her face expressed wistful delight – she might have been on the point of coming to orgasm. While Heller skilfully guided her round the floor in his well-disciplined style, Hannchen Koch arched her back and moved her behind half a metre to left or right with every step of the dance.

  Fritz Koebner led me into a corner of the room, tapped me lightly on the shoulder and breathed into my ear, almost inaudibly, ‘I’d better warn you.’ I looked inquiringly at him, but he fell silent, for just then Frau Koch, waggling her behind, sashayed past us. ‘Warn you against my father,’ he whispered. My conscious mind refused to take in this information; it was too full, so to speak, to admit anything else.

  All this happened within a few bars of the music. Then the door was flung open, and we heard Frau Koebner’s voice. ‘All clear! It was only Frau Hansl from downstairs kindly bringing us a bag of sugar.’ The gramophone was switched off at once, and normal conditions were restored. I was slightly sorry when the music stopped. I’d have liked to go on watching Frau Koch doing her grotesque dance.

  But now it was time for me to tell the story of my journey, and then we would decide what to do next.

  When I had finished, someone asked me where I would really like to go. ‘France. I’d love to see France,’ I heard myself saying, to my own surprise. But reality, as I knew, was very different: I needed a place to hide in Berlin, and I depended entirely on the people here at the Koebners’ to help me. I didn’t want to get in touch with my Jewish friends and acquaintances, not with Irene Scherhey, or Ernst Schindler or Max Bäcker. They mustn’t even know that I was back in Berlin.

  Frau Koebner had been very friendly to me from the first. I had liked her at once: she was a pleasant, clever woman. Her husband, on the other hand, behaved with courteous civility to me but showed no personal warmth. I thought I even detected a certain dislike in his attitude. Now, rather reluctantly, he said he would have to think up a new strategy. Heller suddenly seemed to be upset; he had spent a good deal of money on his blank forms from Warsaw, and now he didn’t know whether they would be any more use to him.

  Finally, Fritz had a
n idea. Before 1933 the Koebners had often spent the summer holidays as sub-tenants of an old man who lived beside the Wannsee. Until his retirement he had commanded huge ocean-going steamships, and then had captained a barge on the River Spree. This captain, Fritz thought, was a sad and lonely bachelor, and would surely be glad of a little female company in his basement apartment. In addition, said Fritz, he had never concealed his poor opinion of the Nazis. After they came to power, he had written letters to all the Jews he knew personally, telling them how indignant he felt about the treatment they were suffering.

  Fritz Koebner said he would go to see this Herr Klaar in Kladow the next day. Our little party broke up. I went a few steps further with Hannchen Koch to Alexanderplatz. This was the part of the city where I had grown up, and where I had always had many friends and relations. But now I didn’t know where to spend the night. Emil Koch’s night shifts had come to an end, so I couldn’t go back to Kaulsdorf. In any case, it was close to miraculous that the Gestapo hadn’t long ago turned up at Hannchen Koch’s home. After all, I had travelled under her name to Bulgaria, where I had attracted the attention of the police several times.

  When we said goodbye, Hannchen pressed a milk can into my hand. She thought that would protect me from suspicion; if I happened to come up against a checkpoint I should just say I was off to get milk for my child. Only when we had parted did it occur to me how pointless this idea was. No one went to get milk for her child in the middle of the night. And as I clutched the metal handle of the can my fingers were slowly turning numb. It was a cold November evening.