Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  Every evening she came to my bed, which was beautifully made up with white sheets, to give me a goodnight kiss. Once she heated the bathroom stove specially for us. When I was sitting in the water she came to wash me; she had found a cake of the finest, sweet-smelling pre-war soap specially for the occasion. This very cool, reserved woman with her delicate complexion and deep-set eyes suddenly said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you for decades. You’re my friend, my little sister, you’re what I’ve always longed for, you’re my daughter.’ Then she kissed me all over, praising the separate parts of my body and speaking as I had only ever heard men speak before. It was a remarkable outburst, but not unpleasant. I gave myself up to it, without showing any reaction, but thinking all the time: Oh God, this is a sin, this is a perversion.

  She ended the scene after a few minutes by rubbing me dry. I went to bed, repeating the confession of sins as a way of somehow coping with the incident.

  One day Karola told me that in the afternoon she was going to Zeuthen, a little place outside Berlin, to see her sister-in-law. When she came back late that evening, she put her arms round me and said, ‘I’ve done it. My hopes are fulfilled, Camilla will take you.’

  My time with her was over. Karola had suffered from knowing that she was doing something forbidden, even though we had larked around together a great deal, often laughing until we cried. She didn’t invite me to come and stay with her again.

  Before I could move to Camilla Fiochi’s, however, Heller had found somewhere else for me to go. Frau Janicke lived a little further to the south of Neukölln. The poorest streets of this part of the city were becoming familiar to me. There had never been many Jews living in these lower-class areas; they had not been considered good addresses. The advantage of that was that no one here knew me. I didn’t have to live with the constant fear of running into an informer.

  I was to go and stay with Frau Janicke, allegedly as a nurse for her grandmother. This old lady, who came from a small town in Thuringia, had pneumonia. She wouldn’t have been comfortable in hospital, but could not stay at home alone; there was a shortage of doctors, for most of them were at the front. No doctor paid home visits these days to ordinary patients on a health plan – except for Benno Heller. Of course it was against the law for him to look after this old Aryan woman, but he was happy to do it in order to help me find a new refuge.

  Gerda Janicke had a small son about two and a half years old. Her husband was at the front. She lived in her apartment – one and a half rooms at 18 Schierker Strasse – with her grandmother, her adored little boy, and now me. I found myself in an environment that was the quintessence of the lower middle class. Many Nazis who prided themselves on supporting the cause lived in this apartment block, which was still a new building at the time. On festive days the place was thick with swastika banners.

  I hated having to play the part of a nurse. Frau Janicke gave me a white overall and I tied a white scarf round my head, but I had no idea what I ought to be doing. The old lady was always calling out, ‘Nurse!’ in her Thuringian dialect, and I scurried around the apartment looking busy. Heller had persuaded Frau Janicke that nursing her grandmother would be a great strain on her, and it would be useful to everyone if she took me in to help with the work of the household. But there wasn’t really much to be done.

  There had been no agreement on my board, so I was terribly hungry. Once a week I met Frau Koch in a cheap café in Köpenick, and ate the standard dish of the day there. She also gave me a little pocket money, a bread roll and perhaps a hundred grams of margarine. But that was nowhere near enough to satisfy me. Meanwhile I watched chubby-cheeked little Jörg, Frau Janicke’s son, thriving and eating any amount of food. In my mind I called this voracious child the ‘Little Teuton’.

  And her grandmother, that silly old woman who thought the world of the Führer, distrusted me from the first. Once, when Frau Janicke was taking the child for a walk, she called, ‘Nurse, I’d like some bread and butter.’ There was a beautiful loaf of rye bread in the kitchen. Its aroma rose to my nostrils so strongly that I was afraid I might go mad with hunger. I had to spread slice after slice of bread for the old woman, at least four of them. Then she told her granddaughter that she had eaten only two slices, so I was under suspicion of stealing food. Frau Janicke cut notches in her loaf from underneath so that she would notice at once if I secretly took a slice.

  Gerda Janicke, who gave me shelter in the winter of 1942–1943, with her son Jörg, the ‘Little Teuton’.

  All the same, I found ways and means. When the mistress of the house was out, I would turn the butter dish upside down on a hot, damp cloth to make its contents fall on the cloth. That was because the pat of butter was stamped on top with a pattern that I could not have reproduced, but I could shave a very thin slice off the bottom of the pat and eat it. Frau Janicke wondered why the butter was disappearing so quickly, but did not see through my trick.

  To soothe my guilty conscience, I mentally drafted a set of rules for my situation in legal jargon. I called it the ‘Reich Law on the Theft of Victuals as Applied to Those Who Have Gone Underground’. I couldn’t write it down complete with all its clauses, since I had no paper, but mocking the authorities in that way made me feel a little better.

  Once a week at midday I went to see the Hellers, who lived next to Benno Heller’s practice. Sometimes I just looked in for a moment to say that everything was all right, and I had no news. On one such visit I saw the couple’s dining room, which was furnished in very good taste with a large mahogany dining table and other items in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] of the Weimar Republic period. There were no fancifully ornamented old sideboards or dressers here.

  The chairs were covered with royal blue velvet. When Heller asked me to sit down, his wife instantly interrupted him. ‘Wait a minute! Newspaper first!’ He then put a sheet of newspaper on the seat of the chair to protect it – as if I had been wallowing in the dirt. That was just one of the dreadful humiliations that I suffered at the couple’s hands. Later, I found out that everyone who entered that dining room was made to sit on a newspaper in the same way.

  This room was the apple of Frau Heller’s eye. She looked after it with the most meticulous care. Once, when she had visitors, she thought the cleaning lady hadn’t polished the wooden parquet flooring well enough. She picked up the heavy broom used for that purpose and worked away on the floor until, since she had chronic heart trouble, she suffered a bad attack.

  That was what the Hellers were like: on the one hand heroically ready to risk their lives for others, on the other thinking as much of their polished floor as of resistance to the Nazis.

  I was under observation in Frau Janicke’s apartment. A doorman’s wife by the name of Krause lived one floor down, a woman who thought herself every inch the member of a superior class. Her son was an engineer, and she was a great supporter of the Nazi regime. She was always asking Frau Janicke, ‘Why don’t you get that woman who’s living with you and looking after your grandmother properly registered?’ Frau Janicke had to think up excuses. She claimed that I only occasionally slept in the apartment, but all the same she often sent me out to fetch milk early in the morning, when anyone could see me.

  ‘Frau Janicke, do I have to?’ I asked.

  ‘Please, couldn’t you make yourself a bit useful? I’m doing enough for you. And anyway I’m still in my dressing-gown.’

  So I would slip out early in the morning to the dairy, which was a great place for gossip. I got milk on the ration card for small children, and the first thing I did was to disappear into the front entrance of a building and drink a good gulp of it. But now I had to fill the milk can up again. As it happened, there was a pump very close, but I didn’t know how to pump just the right amount of water into the can, working it on my own.

  Then an SA man came along. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked in friendly tones. ‘I see you have your hands full.’ And he pumped water for me. I let some of it run into the
hollow of my hand, which meant I could fill the can up to the right level again. I thanked him heartily, and the SA man said goodbye as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to help me dilute the milk. Frau Janicke was alone in noticing that the milk in the can had a blue tinge to it. ‘How can I help that?’ I asked. ‘How am I to know what quality of milk gets delivered to the dairy?’ When she next went to get milk herself, it wasn’t as blue as before.

  There was also increasing tension between me and Dr Heller. He learned that Frau Janicke was dissatisfied with my nursing skills.

  Once I told him, ‘That sick old lady is so thin, I get the impression she has a tapeworm. I’ve seen something like that when I sat her on the toilet.’

  ‘That would explain a lot,’ he said. ‘Another day you must keep whatever comes away there.’ Next time he paid a home visit he looked at the results, and said, ‘You silly girl, that’s not a tapeworm, you’ve seen but scraps of the intestines that can come away at any time. Really, you have no idea what you’re doing!’

  ‘How am I supposed to know that?’

  The gynaecologist Benno Heller and his wife Irmgard, around 1930. (photo credit 4.1)

  ‘A student nurse is expected to have mastered the basic elements of nursing the sick after two months.’

  ‘But I’m not a student nurse!’

  ‘No, you’re the distinguished holder of a school-leaving certificate, you know Latin and French and you’re highly educated, but when it comes to anything practical you’re hopeless.’

  Quarrels like that were quite common between us, and they did much to damage my self-confidence. We fought like cat and dog, and then made up the quarrel and felt close to each other again.

  His wife, however, clearly couldn’t stand me.

  Irmgard Heller was a tall, very slender lady, and she always wore her hair in the traditional German style. In the war, that was known as the ‘all-clear hairdo’, referring to the All Clear when an air raid was over, and everyone could come out of the shelters. When she put her head back a little way, I felt I ought to address her in medieval language as ‘Most noble lady’.

  She came from the upper middle-class society of Leipzig, and should really have married someone from the same circles. But then the First World War broke out, she had gone to work at a field hospital, and there had fallen in love with Benno Heller, a medical student assisting the doctors. She married that son of a Jewish merchant family in Bad Dürkheim, and adored him for ever after.

  Heller’s wife had good reasons not to like me. It was my fault that a tender relationship of the past between her husband and Frau Janicke had been revived. He sometimes visited Frau Janicke’s apartment with his Jewish star concealed, and not only to treat her sick grandmother. Heller himself once asked me angrily, ‘Do you suppose I’m doing it for fun? When I have so much on my mind, and we’re all of us malnourished? I have to pay Frau Janicke for sheltering you with my prowess in bed.’ That was dreadfully embarrassing to me, but what could I do about it?

  Frau Janicke herself, on the other hand, tried to keep the relationship secret from me. She claimed to have a new lover who was a dentist. When he was with her, I had to stay away from the apartment. Afterwards, she would put the doormat outside the door lengthwise as a signal to me that it was all clear.

  So although Irmgard Heller had good reasons for her jealousy, she and her husband stayed together when it really mattered. Benno Heller’s marriage to an Aryan protected him from deportation. However, when he had the chance to emigrate and join his brother in the United States, he chose not to go because his wife’s heart trouble meant that he could not have taken her with him.

  3

  I had first come into contact with the fascinating world of the circus through Karola Schenk, and now I learned more about it from her sister-in-law when I went to stay with her in December 1942.

  Camilla Fiochi was one of ten children in the Schenk family. They had all been born in a caravan, and their parents had given them exotic-sounding names, since they were destined for careers in the circus.

  Camilla Fiochi had seldom attended school, but she had been very ambitious and successful as a circus artiste. She did so well that she could turn her back on the life of the travelling circus and get engagements at permanent venues, like the Friedrichstadt Palace theatre. After many years on the stage, she had fallen in love with Paolo Fiochi, an Italian who was also a performer and a little younger than she was. They became a couple, married, and Camilla used her savings to build a pretty villa in Zeuthen.* She was planning to live happily there with Paolo and hoped, although it would be late in the day for her, to get pregnant. That wish was not to come true. One day Paolo travelled to his native Italy, where he met a very youthful dancer, fell head over heels in love with her, and soon the two of them had a baby.

  Meanwhile Camilla was still living in her villa in Zeuthen, south-east of Berlin in the Brandenburg Mark, and she welcomed me to it. ‘My colleagues have always been properly put up here,’ she told me by way of a greeting. She took me into a charming room, suitable for a young girl, with white-painted furniture, where I was to stay. I was enchanted.

  Then she asked me to guess her age. Her hair was bleached platinum blonde, and she had very well cared-for skin; her figure was delicate, and she had made herself up like a girl. Of course I wanted to compliment her. ‘I could say that I thought you were twenty-five,’ I said, ‘but that wouldn’t really be honest. Looking at you I’d put your age in the thirties, maybe even in the second half of your thirties.’ She crowed with laughter, chuckled happily, and was delighted with me. As I had seen the yellowish spots on the backs of her hands, and the fine white line in the iris of her eyes, I knew that she must really be somewhere between her early fifties and mid-fifties.

  Karola Schenk had warned me in advance. ‘Camilla is crazy. You’ll have a tough time with her,’ she had said as we went by rail to Zeuthen. ‘She throws fits of rage if there are no cigarettes in the house, no cognac and no real coffee.’ All those things were available only at unaffordable black-market prices, and by this time Camilla was impoverished. Sometimes the gas was cut off because she couldn’t pay her bill, sometimes it was the electricity or the telephone. ‘It’s touching, really, that in spite of it she’s ready to give you shelter. For all her faults, she’s a warm-hearted person,’ Karola had added.

  Since Paolo’s departure, the Trio Fiochi had been wound up, but Camilla had plans for a new troupe. However, she had only one trainee available, a girl of fifteen called Inge Hubbe. Secretly, both of them knew that Inge would never make a circus performer. She had certainly earned good marks for gymnastics at school, but that wasn’t enough. Frau Fiochi was very strict with her and sometimes even beat her. I was often present when she did ballet exercises with Inge Hubbe or tried to teach her the ‘bridge’ position: going from a handstand to arching over backwards like a bridge, and then slowly moving forward into a handstand again.

  I was supposed to lead her through the moves, but it was no good. Inge couldn’t manage them, and let herself collapse on a chair, bathed in sweat, as soon as her teacher left the rehearsal room. Frau Fiochi generally remained within earshot.

  As Inge sat there, I kept calling, ‘Come on, Inge, do the bridge! Do a better bridge!’ And finally, ‘Yes, now you’re coming on! That was a good arch!’ Hereupon Camilla Fiochi came back in, and surprisingly enough Inge really could do a successful bridge position at that point.

  Postcard advertising ‘The Fiochi Sisters and Paolo’, around 1927. One of the artistes is demonstrating the bridge position at the top of the picture. (photo credit 4.2)

  Inge was going through all the problems of adolescence, and was bored to tears for most of the day. My own relationship with the girl was friendly, but on the cool and indifferent side. I had no idea at the time that her family would come to play an important part in my life.

  All the Schenks had specialised in what were known as ‘Icarian’ performances: specta
cles in which people were thrown through the air as if they could fly, emulating the attempts of the classical Icarus. For instance, three acrobats formed a tower: one stood on the shoulders of another, while the music first died away and then played a flourish. Each movement had to be worked out exactly to the millimetre so that the three people could keep their balance. The real show began when two such human towers faced one another and the two men at the top threw another performer, usually a delicately built young girl, back and forth between them.

  The Trio Fiochi had simplified this turn long ago to one forming a tower three men high, but Camilla and Inge didn’t have a third person so that they could put it into rehearsal again.

  I was well off with Camilla Fiochi, who was a passionate opponent of the Nazis. She had grown up among circus artistes, had a soft spot for travelling people, and couldn’t stand the police and the authorities; she felt deep sympathy for all nomadic peoples, who of course included gypsies and Jews. ‘You won’t find me denying anyone food,’ she said emphatically. ‘We artistes are special people who believe in sharing what we have.’ I contributed the food that Frau Koch gave me to the common housekeeping, and ate breakfast, lunch and supper with Camilla Fiochi and Inge Hubbe.

  In the evening we played games: board games like draughts, or games I hadn’t known before like backgammon or the Chinese game of mah-jong. Camilla was so childish that she always wanted to win, but she didn’t play with any particular acumen. I had to make mistakes on purpose so that she could beat me. Then she would clap her hands with delight.

  On the other hand, she worked me terribly hard. She took the opportunity of having me clean the whole house thoroughly. Crawling round on my knees, I had to leave every corner spotless. The trouble was that Camilla was unable to articulate clearly just what she wanted me to do. She spoke in a curiously affected way, and unfortunately her grammar wasn’t always correct. In addition, she kept mixing up the meaning of single words that sounded similar. When she was agitated her voice rose to a hysterical screech, and all I could understand was that I mustn’t do something ‘like this’ but ‘like this’. At the same time she went red in the face with fury, called me an idiot and pulled my hair. Half an hour later she would be apologising profusely, caressing me and saying, ‘I’m an idiot myself, I’m mentally sick, I’m crazy! I don’t have any money to buy bread, and here I go bringing another mouth to be fed into the house.’