Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  In these days I began hating Eva Deutschkron like poison. At the same time I was ashamed of myself for it, considering my feelings inappropriate, unseemly and ungrateful. She did me no harm. But I could hardly think clearly because I was crazed by hunger.

  I kept repeating the words of the confession of sins, and in a kind of childish superstition I wanted to prove myself guilty of as many sins as possible. I hoped that my suffering, my fear and my need were a punishment for my misdeeds – because then there was a prospect of their coming to an end when I had atoned for everything.

  Unlike me, Eva Deutschkron had ration cards of her own. She told me how she had come by them when we were washing the dishes, and had been passing the time by finding out whether we had any acquaintances in common. In that way we came to Mirjam Grunwald, who had been in the same class as me at school.

  She was an intelligent, talented, highly educated girl, and came from a distinguished and cultured Jewish family. Like me again, Mirjam was one of the best students in the class. We had been very polite, but had not really taken to each other.

  Mirjam’s parents had been given an opportunity to go abroad, but when it came to Mirjam herself the trap closed on her. She was called up to do forced labour. Of course it was terrible for her parents to leave Germany without their daughter. To find some way out of this conflict, they left all their fortune behind for her as a ‘black-market’ fund. I imagined this, picturesquely, as a large sack of money consisting of coins painted black. The money was to make it easier for Mirjam to survive, and they hoped she would be able to follow them to the United States as soon as possible.

  The two girls got to know each other in the firm where Eva Deutschkron and her husband were also doing forced labour. Eva talked about her early marriage there, and passed round a photo of her husband. One weekend, to their surprise, the young couple were invited to coffee by Mirjam Grunwald, who entertained them very hospitably.

  Then Mirjam told the couple that she had means of going underground; she had money, an address to which she could disappear, and a source of ration cards. But she could bear her mortal terror only in the arms of a man. So she suggested a very unusual bargain: Eva was to lend Mirjam her husband for an indefinite period of time, getting money and ration cards in return. Part of the deal was that Eva would see her husband just once a month: no love-making, no emotional outbursts, their meeting would be only so that they could know they were both still alive.

  This proposition left Eva utterly baffled. She went to the Hellers to ask what they thought. Their advice was: ‘In absurd times, everything is absurd. You can save yourselves only by absurd means, since the Nazis are out to murder you all.’ So in the end the young couple agreed to the bargain. Eva Deutschkron told me all this amidst fits of terrible weeping. Frau Janicke knew about it, but Eva asked me not to let her know that now I knew as well.

  Myself, I had reached the lowest point of my life. I was freezing all day, my teeth chattered with cold and hunger. And suddenly I had another very unpleasant affliction; I felt stabbing pains in my bladder and couldn’t contain my urine. When it happened I was in the dairy, fetching milk for Frau Janicke. A pool formed beneath me. I don’t know whether the other people there noticed anything, but I couldn’t help it. I thought, desperately: the enemy is doing all this to us. Perhaps such repellent things are actually easier for others to understand than piles of corpses, than the really great crimes of human history.

  It was particularly uncomfortable that I had no way of washing and drying my clothes. My underclothes stuck to my body, dried slowly – and stank. Now Eva Deutschkron and Gerda Janicke really could consider themselves a class above me.

  I wasn’t allowed to go to the toilet at night. Early in the morning I had to fetch milk. So I simply took the milk can to my ice-cold bed with me and used it as often as necessary. In the morning I emptied the can in the bathroom and rinsed it out – sneakily, I have to admit – with cold water. This disgusting business too, I told myself, can be chalked up to the enemy’s account.

  One afternoon the two other women set out for a long walk with Jörg, the Little Teuton, leaving me with the task of polishing the kitchen furniture to a shine with a piece of leather. I soon realised that no shine could be achieved by that method, and I didn’t have the strength for it either. So I simply lay down on the sofa and read. At some point, Herr Janicke had acquired a wonderful leather-bound edition of the works of Dostoevsky. This diversion saved me for a little while. I was reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time, and was fascinated even as my teeth chattered.

  Suddenly I was aware that the three would soon be back. I quickly climbed on a chair and wiped the furniture at the very top, expecting Frau Janicke to check up on it there. Then I lay down on the sofa again, but was ready to jump up as soon as I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  I didn’t notice that the dust on top of the cupboard was now running black and slimy down the sides like ink.

  Of course this incident was reported to the Hellers, hot off the press. Both Eva and Gerda were enthusiastic about Benno Heller, with his resemblance to a dream doctor in a Hollywood film. They, like me, regularly visited him to tell him how things were going. They particularly liked to describe my disastrous influence on the housekeeping.

  ‘Ah, so here’s our distinguished holder of the school-leaving certificate,’ said Heller the next time I went to see him. ‘Fabulous. You should be proud of that certificate, Marie, since you can’t do anything of the least practical use.’ He sat down at the piano and played a few bars. The doors to his consulting rooms were open, and all his patients could and were intended to hear him. Then, with his wife joining in, he adapted the refrain of a walking song from fal-lal-lee, fal-lal-la’ to ‘Grubby girl, dirty girl’, which they sang in two parts.

  ‘I can explain what happened,’ I said desperately. ‘I’m not well, I have an inflammation of the bladder. Please give me something to cure it.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ he replied angrily.

  ‘But there must be something to make it better, isn’t there?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied again, and he added a strange remark. ‘Jews who go underground don’t get sick.’

  I couldn’t sleep the following night. My thoughts were in confusion. I was afraid of simply falling down in the street unconscious in my hungry, wretched condition. And then, if I was taken to the police, my whole struggle so far would have been for nothing.

  As I lay in bed, shivering all over, I suddenly heard the nursery rhyme about ‘Hänschen klein’ [Little Hans]. It wasn’t me singing it but a boy, the son of a cleaner who had been very helpful to us in the year of my mother’s death. Even as a child, Fred Heinzel had been against the Nazis.

  I thought: why am I suddenly hearing this song? There must be some connection between Heller’s refusal to help me and little Fred Heinzel. And then, in my strange mental state between dream and reality, I made up my mind about something: if I could solve that puzzle I would take it as a good omen. But if I couldn’t solve it I would not take it as a bad omen, because that would be superstition, which is not allowed in Jewish tradition.

  Meanwhile, I kept hearing Fred Heinzel’s voice singing ‘Hänschen klein’. And suddenly I had a picture in front of my eyes. We were sitting by the open hearth in the dining room of the Prenzlauer Strasse apartment of my childhood. The boy was telling my father about school, where he had trouble with the very demanding gymnastic exercises in the military style that he was expected to do. They had made him cry in the sports lesson. He had told his gymnastics teacher, a staunch Nazi and a sadist, that he couldn’t do the exercises any more because he was in pain. Thereupon the martinet had shouted at him, ‘German boys don’t get sick!’ That was the connection. Heller had said, ‘Jews who go underground don’t get sick.’ Although he was a good doctor, intelligent when it came to making a diagnosis and psychologically skilled in treating his patients, he couldn’t bear the visitors in his two waiting room
s to mingle with each other. To him, I might be a Jew who had gone underground, but I mustn’t be a sick Jew.

  Marie Jalowicz in the winter of 1943.

  I woke up next morning feeling relieved. I had solved the puzzle and I would get better. And sure enough, after exactly a week I had thrown off the infection. By this time Eva Deutschkron had run out of new fashion ideas to keep Frau Janicke happy. She had once dreamed of being a fashion designer, and she had already designed a beach outfit, a walking costume and evening dresses for her friend. It was February, so I suggested, ‘Why not design a Carnival costume?’

  ‘Oh, what a good idea. I can spend a whole afternoon with that,’ replied Eva. She was genuinely grateful to me.

  When she showed us her costume designs, we went on to talk about New Year’s Eve, and Gerda Janicke mentioned the custom of telling fortunes from the shapes taken by molten lead dropped into water. That reminded me of my encounter with the clairvoyant, and the idea came up of asking for her services again. ‘I’d really like to know whether my apartment is going to be bombed,’ said Frau Janicke.

  I knew where Frau Klemmstein lived, but to get permission for an extra outing I claimed that I would have to ask Frau Koch. Trying to telephone her could take a long time, because she was often out and about in the extensive laundry building where she worked. ‘Stay out as long as you need,’ said Frau Janicke generously.

  I used this opportunity to celebrate my recovery. I ordered and ate the cheap standard dish of the day in two different cafés, a cabbage one-pot dish and a swede one-pot dish – that was luxury, even thought there wasn’t a gram of meat or fat in either, but at least they were hot. Then I went to a shabby coffee-house for a cup of ersatz coffee. I could be as extravagant as this only because I had prospects of money – I had decided that my visit to Frau Klemmstein would be purely fictional. I was going to keep the money for her clairvoyance and for the telephone and travelling, and I would spend it on myself.

  I went happily back to Schierker Strasse, told them that Frau Koch had given me the name of the village where the clairvoyant lived, and that when I got there I would have to ask the way, because fortune-telling was illegal. It cost five marks per fortune. Then Frau Janicke cast the lead herself, and a woman she knew joined her. On the day when I had arranged to visit Trude Neuke for the first time since leaving Zeuthen, I told them that I was going to see the clairvoyant.

  Trude had told me her address only once. You didn’t write things down at that time, but I would never have forgotten it: Number 13 Schönleinstrasse in the Kreuzberg district. I happily climbed the stairs. I saw an oval porcelain plaque on the first floor, with the name Neuke on it. When I had rung the bell I heard dragging footsteps coming to the door. A tall, thin man in his forties opened it. A mild smile crossed his stern features, forming dimples in his cheeks. I liked that mixture of severity and human kindness in his face at first sight.

  The master of the house, Julius Neuke, was known as Jule. I knew a little more from Inge Hubbe about her stepfather. He was a lathe operator, which meant that he had to do heavy work while standing, but he suffered from leg ulcers that made the job a torment. As a result he often had to be off work sick. His family had a hard time making ends meet financially.

  Jule Neuke knew all about me. He steered me into the kitchen. On stepping into it I thought at once: Hello, you nice kitchen! Yet the room was very conventional, neither particularly handsome nor lavishly furnished. But it had an atmosphere in which I immediately felt at ease.

  ‘Do sit down,’ said my host, offering me a chair. He spoke with such formality that I wondered if he was addressing someone else in the room, but there was no one. Apart from his old-fashioned way of speaking to me, Jule Neuke welcomed me with great warmth. His wife, he said, was in Magdeburg, where she sometimes went to visit her old mother Anna Aernecke and her three sisters, who were still living in their home town. But today the special purpose of her trip, as I guessed, was to look for someone in her extended family who would take me in.

  Jule Neuke offered me a cup of ersatz coffee and set off in search of some biscuits hidden in the next room for special occasions. It took him some time to get back. As I waited, my glance fell on a postcard stuck into the frame of the glazed front of the kitchen cupboard. It was obviously from Trude, and I could read only the side showing, but I didn’t want or need to read any more: she had arrived all right, she said, and her mother was well. Then came the news that I read at least ten times; I soon knew what it said by heart. With wonky punctuation, and her own unique mixture of capital and small letters, she had written: ‘Elle, Could but says no. Erna happy To for six weeks.’ I knew at once who and what the meaning of that was.

  My relationship with Julius Neuke stayed just as it had been on our first meeting; he was one of the few men who simply liked me without the slightest trace of sexual innuendo. He would never have been pushy. We arranged a time when I could come back, and soon after that I said goodbye.

  It was a very cold day, and as I didn’t know how to kill time I soon went back to Gerda Janicke’s apartment. She and Eva were surprised to see me home so early. I told them an untruthful story: it had all gone well, I had asked after Frau Klemmstein and been told the way to her as soon as I reached the village. I had asked Gerda Janicke in advance what problems interested her and her friends in particular. One of her acquaintances, a young widow, wanted to know if there would be a new love in her life. I thought up remarks that might refer to the subjects they suggested in some way, and told them, with much stammering and stuttering and pauses for thought, what the fortune teller had allegedly said. It went down very well indeed. They were all happy, I had had a day off, had eaten something, and made twenty marks for myself.

  I was beginning to get my self-confidence back, and my relationship to the other two women in the apartment also improved. One day they said they would like to go to the cinema. A film with Marika Rökk was showing, and at this time everyone wanted to see it. People longed for something to take their minds off reality, and long lines formed outside the cinemas. Even in great cold or driving rain, they were ready to queue for several hours with the prospect of such enjoyment ahead.

  I loved to see these kitschy films myself. I identified with the women stars, imagining myself in their wonderful dresses, dancing gracefully through ballrooms. Meanwhile a second part of my mind was closely analysing the political ideology of the films, which were designed to encourage the populace to see things through while also looking for such diversions, and I despised the sentimentality served up by the Nazis.

  So I went to stand in line and get tickets for the two ladies. After I had waited in the cold for hours, someone came out of the cinema and called, ‘Please don’t wait any longer. The tickets will be sold out in five minutes’ time.’ I was so furious that I just stood there defiantly, even when the ticket office had closed and everyone else had gone away. I would so much have liked to make myself popular by going back to Schierker Strasse with those tickets.

  Suddenly a distinguished-looking old gentleman came over to me, and said, ‘I have two tickets available.’ I stared at him as if he had fallen from heaven.

  ‘In this cold,’ he explained, ‘I didn’t set out just to get back the small sum these tickets cost. I knew how many people would like to see the film.’ His wife, he said, wasn’t feeling well, and so she had given up the idea of going to the cinema. I showed my delight so obviously that he asked, ‘Does your eternal bliss depend upon it?’

  ‘Yes!’ I replied, in all seriousness.

  ‘Then in those circumstances, allow me to make you a present of our two tickets,’ he said. ‘And you ought to have a hot drink at once to revive your spirits.’ We shook hands as we parted.

  I decided, then and there, that if I survived and was still a decent human being, I would try all my life to listen to people and see whether they needed me. For it sometimes takes only a few words, a small gesture at the right moment, to help someone in need to r
ecover.

  I got home late, but in triumph, with the cinema tickets, and of course I didn’t refuse to take the money for them. Eva Deutschkron looked at me and said, ‘My God, Hanni is frozen blue! Gerda, may I?’ Frau Janicke understood her at once and nodded. Then Eva went into the kitchen, cut me a thick slice of bread, spread it with plenty of butter, and poured me some hot ersatz coffee. And my spirits gradually did revive. It was a wonderful moment of solidarity and companionship between us three women.

  7

  To the last, the Hellers were a deeply contradictory pair. When Irmgard Heller threw her head slightly back, so that you saw her beautiful profile beneath the old German hairstyle, I had the feeling that she regarded those Jewish women in the waiting room who wore the star with traditional anti-Semitic prejudice. It was all the more to her credit that she devoted the last of her strength to saving Jews from the greatest criminals in human history.

  I sometimes talked politics with her husband, the ardent left-winger. Once I said the war would have to be lost to liberate Germany and mankind from Hitler’s regime. ‘But you can’t envisage the defeat of our Wehrm—’ he began to protest impulsively, and then clapped his hand to his mouth to keep the rest of the word Wehrmacht in. I was horrified. I had never met an opponent of the Nazis – from Ida Kahnke the toilet cleaner to Emil Koch the fireman – who hadn’t been convinced that the Allies must win the war. I didn’t start arguing with Heller, because he himself had noticed what he’d said. But the attitude he had betrayed went with the duelling scars on his face.