Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  An appearance at the Friedrichstadt Palace: Paolo Fiochi, Camilla Fiochi and Lieschen Sabbarth with her luxuriant hair. (photo credit 4.3)

  Sometimes Lieschen Sabbarth came visiting. She had been trained by Camilla, very successfully too. Privately I thought of her as the three-wigs girl; Lieschen had such strong, springy tresses that she looked as if she had three heads of hair, one above the other. At the top was a kind of nest made of as much hair as would cover another woman’s entire head. Then there were very abundant locks of medium length, and under that ringlets peeping out. It was a wonderful colour, as well, a glossy chestnut brown. Lieschen Sabbarth often said, ‘I must be the only circus artiste in Germany who doesn’t have a perm or dyed hair.’ She had grown up in a housing development with gardens in the Nordend district, the daughter of an anarcho-syndicalist of long standing. He had succeeded in bringing up all his many children to be anti-fascists. So Lieschen was particularly nice to me; she would offer me cigarettes and give me sweets.

  Karola Schenk came to see us at the weekend. We were all happy to be reunited. The performers practised the three-man tower together. ‘Oh, this is nice,’ Camilla told Karola as the latter climbed up on her shoulders. ‘You’re as light as a feather!’ Inge watched, but was as stolid as a block of wood, and did not react at all to the performance being rehearsed in front of her.

  Not all the Schenks were with the circus. Camilla’s sister Amanda, for instance, had married a master tailor who was a fanatical Nazi. It was against him of all men that my father had once been involved in a trial. He was representing an impoverished Jew from the East, who did preliminary work for the tailor’s establishment and was never paid for it. By chance I had been present in my father’s chambers when both parties met: the tall, stout master tailor had threatened the thin, red-haired and destitute Jew in a way I had never before seen.

  All that came back to me when Amanda visited Zeuthen, and told me her husband’s name. Fortunately she hadn’t brought him with her in person. I was introduced as Camilla’s Russian household help. I served coffee in silence, and later cleared away the china with an enigmatic smile.

  Camilla had also told some kind of story about me to the couple living above us on the attic floor of the villa. Unfortunately she had immediately forgotten what it was. Was I a Russian to them too? Or was I a Polish worker?

  I once had to take something up to that floor, and delivered it in silence. The young woman was busy at the time, with a dressmaker kneeling in front of her pinning up a hem. She was having a dress for a special occasion made, and looked enchanting in it.

  Another time I had to clean out the coal cellar. In the process I found a tattered Reclam paperback copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, sat down on the heap of coal and began reading it. Suddenly I saw the young lady from the attic apartment standing in front of me. Like me, she got a terrible shock, and went bright red in the face.

  ‘Do you speak German?’ she whispered. It would have been pointless to deny it in view of my reading matter.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ she said, and went upstairs. Then she came back with several biscuits wrapped in silver paper, and gave them to me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said simply. I never saw that neighbour again.

  In part of the cellar that had been converted into a garage, I discovered a large, expensive car. It belonged to Herr Lehmann, Karola’s boss, who lived in Zeuthen with his family. Camilla and Karola knew that he was urgently looking for a household help; his wife was overworked, what with looking after their small children and organising the many large evening parties that he had to give as a prominent Nazi.

  So the sisters-in-law had thought of suggesting me for the job. They thought that Lehmann could even get me the P sign worn by foreign Polish workers. No one would have suspected that a Jewish woman was hiding in his house. However, I was greatly relieved when I heard that Lehmann couldn’t make up his mind to go along with their idea. I wouldn’t have wanted to act the part of maidservant to a Nazi bigwig.

  A stay of two weeks in Zeuthen had been agreed for me. When that time was up, Camilla Fiochi said goodbye to me in a distinctly cool tone. She wished me luck, and thanked me for my work. But something was wrong. I just didn’t know what it was.

  I was back on uncertain ground. Another stay with Frau Janicke had been agreed for me, but not until the New Year. Benno Heller was the only person to whom I could turn now.

  He gave me two addresses of women in Neukölln who were said to rent rooms, but they both turned me away. He did not mention the very last emergency solution to me until both these attempts had failed; then he sent me to see Felicitas in that gloomy bar in Wassertorstrasse. And she sold me to Karl Galecki, the ‘rubber director’, who lived in a hut in the back yard of the place where he worked.

  4

  When I woke in the morning after my first night in the hut, the rubber director had already left for work. He had let me sleep in, but the evening before he had asked me to leave the place before his cleaning lady arrived. For the time being, he didn’t want her to know that a woman was staying there. But he did want to introduce me to his employees, so he asked me to go to the workshop in the course of the morning.

  Many years later, when I was watching the Threepenny Opera performed by the Berliner Ensemble and the beggars made their entrance, I thought: my God, they’re the very image of the people who worked for the rubber director!

  The men whom Galecki summoned, barely a dozen of them, were a most unlikely assortment: pensioners, invalids and veterans, all of whom he had hired, and he paid them well.

  His speech impediment meant that he had to make several attempts to tell them, if indistinctly, that they were to listen to him, and he went on until he was sure they understood him. Then he continued, ‘This is my wife. I’m not on my own any longer, and you must obey her as you would obey me.’ I said a few friendly words and smiled at them. ‘I know we’ll get on well,’ I told them, and then I left.

  That evening Galecki said to me, ‘I watched you walking across the yard. Did you notice how Felicitas shuffles? There’s a world of difference, and that matters to me. She shuffles, you stride out proudly and freely.’ I was very pleased with the compliment, which I took not personally but as something that could be said of all Jews. ‘You stride out proudly and freely.’

  However, that comment also implied an unspoken but suspicious question: so you’re not the lower-class semi-prostitute I was expecting? Then who are you, and where do you come from? That same evening he told me how he hated Jews so much that he could smell them from some distance away. I turned to look at the fish in their aquarium again so that he wouldn’t see me blushing. I ventured to ask what Jews smelled like, but he couldn’t describe it.

  One evening we were invited to supper with his mother, who lived quite close. Her first husband, Galecki’s father, had died prematurely. She had married again, but now she was a widow once more. This elderly woman received me with great curiosity.

  I ate the worst meal of my life there. In honour of the day she had made a meat loaf. It had long ago cooled off on the side of the stove, and was now only lukewarm. Its main ingredient was rotten onions, and the poor quality fat in the sauce had solidified so that it was almost uneatable. Galecki, who loved and honoured his mother, watched me anxiously in case I said anything disparaging. But I remained courteous and friendly and ate a little of it. Once again, the extent of my tolerance amazed him.

  After supper Galecki lay down on the sofa as usual. His mother went into the kitchen, and I said I would help her with the dishes. The old woman was a real sight, with her hair, which was dyed raven black, accentuating every wrinkle in her face. But what followed was genuinely touching. She told me she had been watching me all the time. ‘There’s nothing false in your face,’ she said. ‘You don’t mean any harm. I know my way around life, but these days I can’t understand what’s going on. What do you want with my Karl? He’s a cripple, and you are a nice young woman. I warn
you, I’m sorry to see you setting up house with him and making yourself unhappy.’ I managed to turn the conversation in another direction with a few civil remarks.

  But a few days later Felicitas told her customers at the bar in detail that she had been to hospital on a gynaecological matter, and that was a near-disaster for me. She named several doctors, and also said that she had been treated earlier by Heller. Thinking of this, Galecki said to me, ‘She’s been to a Jewish hospital, she mentions all those Jewish names – and that makes me suspicious of you, too.’ ‘What?’ I asked him. ‘Jewish names?’ Suddenly I was in full control of the situation. I tried persuading myself that the fish in his aquarium were my friends and would protect me. ‘Jews don’t have names like that,’ I objected, and put together any number of idiotic nonsense syllables at random, saying something like ‘Pitshipatshiklatshput-shpitshpappakakak’. He laughed until he cried, thought it very amusing, and then I added more imaginary names, along the lines of ‘Pingpangpong’ and ‘Dingdangdong’. He was splitting his sides, and exclaimed, ‘Oh, you’re priceless! What it is to be young!’

  Around now the rubber director was wondering whether it was time to introduce me to his drinking companions in the bar. I felt terrible misgivings. But before it came to that he turned suspicious once more, and this time I really was in danger. He had been secretly rummaging in my handbag while I was in the kitchen or the bathroom, and had also asked me embarrassingly pointed questions about the situation that, supposedly, I had been obliged to leave. I had learned that to sound credible you must describe familiar circumstances – rather than lies that must then be committed to memory – in realistic detail, even if you are transferring them to another context. So I simply told him how shockingly cramped it had been in Frau Janicke’s apartment, and turned her horrible parents into what I said were my own in-laws. I really had met those two sour-faced pensioners at Gerda Janicke’s. They looked as if they had just bitten into a rotten lemon, and always thought that everyone was out to do them down. They were unpleasant to their sensitive daughter and showed no consideration for her. Of course I didn’t tell Galecki that they were also passionate Nazis.

  But then Felicitas said things in the bar that, yet again, made the rubber director very suspicious about my background. ‘I don’t believe your story any more,’ he said. ‘This has to be cleared up, and fast. If there’s something the matter with your racial origins then this is all over. It would be catastrophic.’

  I knew I was in mortal danger. Galecki was no match for me in physical strength, but he could go into his workshop at any time and phone the Gestapo from there. I couldn’t simply run away, because that would have put Hannchen Koch in dreadful danger. He knew her name and address.

  Calmly and apparently indifferently, I said, ‘You can clear it up in the morning. Now let’s get some sleep.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘And you can do some shopping for me tomorrow.’

  He wrote a shopping list, and left a banknote in a large denomination for me. He wanted a few small things bought from the baker, the butcher, and so on.

  Then a miracle happened. As soon as I was out in the street next morning, Felicitas came shuffling towards me. The hem of her petticoat showed under her winter coat, and she was still very sleepy. ‘Oh, I’m so tired,’ she said, yawning ostentatiously. ‘And I quite forgot to tell you something. I was to tell the rubber director as well, but I forgot about telling him too.’

  ‘What was it?’ I asked.

  She yawned again. ‘Dr Heller came to see me specially yesterday evening, just as I was going to the bar. That young lady, he said, you found her a place somewhere, well, there’s something you must tell her.’ He had drummed the wording into her head, and got her to repeat it several times. Now she came out with it, like a child reciting a poem. The lady at the villa in the Brandenburg Mark apologised for her behaviour to me, and was inviting me to come back at once as her welcome guest.

  I didn’t show what a relief this news was to me. ‘If only you could have told me that a couple of days ago!’ I said calmly. ‘But there’s still time.’ Then I added, ‘Goodbye – I must do some shopping for the rubber director.’

  At that time people had to queue in the shops for ages. But now there was a second miracle; I went into the baker’s to find it entirely empty, bought what Galecki had put on his list, and was out again within a minute. The same thing happened at the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s.

  With a certain pride, I folded the net shopping bag like a flower in bud, put it on the kitchen table, and arranged my purchases and the change from the banknote round it. As I did so, I thought: people in your circles might go off with the change, but in ours we wouldn’t do a thing like that. We’re different.

  Then I went into the workshop and asked the first man I saw, ‘Is the boss here?’

  ‘No, he’s gone to buy some stuff.’

  ‘Well then,’ I said, ‘I’ve locked his living quarters and put his shopping on the table. Here are the keys, and goodbye. It’s possible that I won’t be back. I’m going to make things up with my family.’ And then I walked away.

  Incidentally, there was something strange about that workshop. It contained the kind of Boley lathes that I knew from working for Siemens. The material for the small parts made on them had been abstracted from the armaments industry, by very elaborate means, and the rubber director paid a high price for the method. Then, with much emotion, he delivered those parts back to the armaments industry and thus to his beloved Führer. Galecki was a curious case of split personality: he was passionately devoted to an ideal that at the same time was the means to an end, and he fraudulently exploited it.

  5

  I went to Görlitzer Station at my leisure. Once there I made my way to the platform from which the train for Zeuthen left. It wasn’t five minutes before the steam engine moved elegantly into the station hall. I got into the train, feeling so free and happy on this journey that I could almost have called out loud, ‘Oh, how pretty this is!’ The extreme cold had gone, and slushy, dirty snow lay in the streets of Berlin. But now I was passing through a glittering white landscape in bright sunlight, admiring the snow-capped fences and telegraph poles. I remembered my childhood. On Sundays my father often took me for a little outing in the Tiergarten, the Grunewald or to Wuhlheide. Once, when I was ready to go out, he asked me to wait. ‘Just a moment, I have to finish going through this file. I won’t be long.’ Looking over his shoulder, I saw him write ‘erl’ followed by a full stop on the last page of a set of files – erl. – and I said ‘Erlpoint!’ He laughed and explained that it was an abbreviation of the word erledigt, meaning ‘dealt with’ or ‘finished’. Then we both had the same idea at the same time. While my mother was packing a picnic for us in the kitchen, we began to sing. Doing the goose-step, we marched round the big dining table, lustily bawling, ‘Dealt with, dealt with, dealt with, dealt with,’ to the tune of the German national anthem. Since that day, when I had dealt with some tiresome task, I had often said, ‘I’ll sing this thing out of existence.’ And I did just that now. I sat in the steam train singing our ‘dealt with, dealt with’ ditty, to the tune of the second movement of Joseph Haydn’s Emperor Quartet, as a way of dumping my memories of the rubber director episode once and for all.

  Oddly enough, Camilla Fiochi was already expecting me. From a distance I saw her standing outside her garden gate in the sun. She was wearing an elegant lounging outfit dating from peacetime; the heavy silk was beautifully designed with the dull surface on the outside, and the shiny surface only trimmed with piping. With it, she wore an old-rose blouse.

  Her arms were outspread. It took me only a moment to realise what she expected of me, and then I ran to her, fell into her arms, and let her rock me back and forth like a child. I wondered whether this was reality or a dream. The woman who had shouted insults at me and pulled my hair, now holding me blissfully in her arms?

  First of all I complimented her on her outfit. ‘Black
and old rose are a classic combination,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it will suit you later.’ Arms entwined, we walked through the garden gate.

  ‘Karola was terribly annoyed,’ she began telling me. ‘She said you don’t get goblins except in fairy tales.’ It was some time before I could work out the gist of her disjointed remarks: Camilla Fiochi had assumed that her divorced husband’s new wife, who was totally crazy, was invading her house on the sly and getting up to all kinds of mischief.

  I was at a loss, but I realised that she wanted to keep me in suspense for a while. She made funny faces, I responded in kind, and we fooled about a bit. In the process I discovered that she had been sure I would arrive in Zeuthen by the three o’clock train, as in fact I had. This was the third day she had been waiting for me in her pretty lounging suit, with the coffee table laid for two. If I hadn’t arrived today, she said, she would have given up.

  We sat by the big window. Cold, snowy light flooded in from outside. Frau Fiochi had the ersatz coffee already standing on the side of the stove. She brought us a cinnamon pastry each from the cellar. She had made a great sacrifice in buying these sweet pastries with her white-flour ration coupons. I was happy, I felt safe in an atmosphere where I had been affectionately welcomed and entertained. My joy over all this was much greater than my curiosity about what had actually happened.