Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  We quarrelled again and again. Once, Frau Heller, who had heart trouble, was lying on the sofa in their dining room. A box of sweets stood on the table. My mouth was watering. It was a long time since such good things had been available on the open market.

  Benno Heller noticed my glance. ‘We share the sweets,’ he said, smiling. ‘First she eats half of them, then we divide what’s left between us, then we divide what’s left next time between us and so on – until she’s eaten them all by herself.’

  ‘I hope to lead a perfectly normal life some time in the future,’ I replied, ‘and then I’ll invite you both to coffee. And we’ll nibble some sweets too.’ That last sentence had just slipped out of me. Such a remark was of course idiotic, and tactless to Frau Heller, ill as she was.

  That did not escape Heller. He raised his hand at once and slapped my face. It was not a hard slap, and it did more damage to my mind than to my face. I took it as a deep humiliation.

  I went out without another word. The doctor ran after me. ‘Mariechen, I didn’t mean it like that!’ he cried. I was halfway down the stairs, and turned back. He was overwrought and didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, he said. I accepted his apology. We didn’t have much time to make up the quarrel.

  A little later we had our last and worst argument. We talked angrily. I felt that he was obsessed by the idea of saving as many Jews as possible. There were half a dozen of them sheltering illegally in his apartment during the day, trying to look as if they had some good reason to be there: wiping down the window frames or cleaning vegetables. And Heller was always urging his Aryan former patients to take someone in. I feared that sooner or later it would end in disaster.

  ‘What’s going to happen when someone who’s gone underground is staying with people who’ve changed their minds and give him up to the Gestapo?’ I asked. Such cases had been known. Many of the Jewish women whom he helped to escape had not been prepared for a life underground. ‘You’re simply pushing those women in at the deep end. But many of them can’t swim, and certainly not under water,’ I warned the gynaecologist reproachfully. He had no idea what I was talking about, and got angrier and angrier. Then he exploded. ‘I’ve seen through you, and I don’t think much of your character! You don’t want me to help anyone but you! If I find a dozen refuges, you want them all for yourself, a week here, a week there. That’s how you aim to survive until the end of the war. But it’s not all about you. We have to save as many people as possible!’

  To me, that was the end. ‘You’re insulting my honour,’ I said, ‘and this is the end of our relationship.’ I walked out without saying goodbye. Once again he followed me to the stairwell and called, mockingly, ‘You’ll be back on the day we next agreed to meet, won’t you? You’ll come, oh yes, you’ll come!’ I turned, and cried with all the pride of which I was capable, ‘No, I won’t! Never again!’ And then I was gone.

  I didn’t have the courage to go back to Frau Janicke and describe this terrible scene to her. I wandered aimlessly further and further out of the city. It was very cold; my feet were frozen stiff. To warm them up I stamped hard on the ground at every step I took. In my sense of desolation and misery, I wished heartily that I could meet the only friend and ally of many long years still left to me: Hanni Koch. ‘Want to meet Koch, want to meet Koch,’ I muttered to myself, stamping my feet, but I knew that she couldn’t possibly be in this part of the city. She was probably sitting on her stool in the office of the Köpenick laundry.

  And then, suddenly, a familiar figure did come towards me. She was a delicately built woman, and I knew very well that she wasn’t Frau Koch, however much I wished for that. She was wrapped in a wonderful green stole of the finest wool, an expensive garment such as Hannchen Koch had never possessed. This person came closer, stopped right in front of me and said, ‘My word, you do look cross!’ It was Lieschen Sabbarth.

  The three-wigs girl, whom I had met by chance that day in a street in Neukölln, was also in a temper. Lieschen had just been to see a colleague who claimed to have sprained her ankle badly. Because of that injury, the whole troupe of acrobats were obliged to cancel a show for a Wehrmacht audience, which would have been very well paid. With typical solidarity, however, Lieschen had gone all the way from the extreme north of Berlin to the south to visit her colleague. But she had found only the supposed invalid’s mother at home. ‘What, sprained her ankle?’ asked the mother. ‘I don’t know about that. She’s met this officer, he’s in Berlin for three days and treating her to all sorts of good things.’

  At this news, Lieschen Sabbarth had turned round in a fury to go home again. On the way, we had met. We went a few steps together, and then she invited me into a café, ordered ersatz coffee for both of us and bought me a piece of yeast cake. We sat there for a long time, enjoying our conversation.

  ‘I’m going to tell you something that no one else knows,’ she said at one point. ‘Give me your word of honour not to breathe a word about it.’ The secret was that she, who had been trained by Camilla Fiochi and was friends with her to this day, had an illegitimate child by Paolo Fiochi. It had happened five or six years ago, when they were all living under the same roof in Zeuthen. At the time Paolo Fiochi was already in a relationship with his great love the Italian dancer. But he and Lieschen were young and bored, and so they had started an affair. I was shocked. At that time I couldn’t understand how such a thing was possible.

  When we parted, Lieschen Sabbarth gave me two packages that had really been meant for her colleague. ‘Here, I don’t want to keep these. You have them,’ she said. One was a prettily wrapped fifty-gram chocolate bar, the other a packet of twenty cigarettes tied up with a coloured ribbon bow. Fortified by these presents, I went back to Schierker Strasse.

  It was evening by now. Gerda Janicke and Eva Deutschkron were waiting for me, and they were overwrought. Not primarily for my sake, of course, but if anything had happened to me they would be in danger too. To mollify them, I took the two packages out of my bag, and said, ‘I had a very special experience today. And I brought this back for little Jörg.’ I meant the chocolate. Two minutes later I was calling myself an idiot, as Frau Fiochi herself so often had. I had given away expensive luxuries that I would have enjoyed myself, and there hadn’t really been any point in it. Frau Janicke hardly even said thank you, but carelessly threw the packages into a drawer.

  And then an idea jumped at me, like a dog barking in my ear and telling me what to say to the two women: I delivered a long lecture extempore. I took my aunt Grete as my subject, and it was brilliant. I told them her entire life story, described her appearance and her character – and I didn’t say she was my aunt, I claimed she was a former Aryan neighbour of mine whom I had met in the street. She had insisted on giving me a couple of presents for my hostess and her dear little boy, I said, but she had to go and buy them first, and I was kept waiting for a long time.

  I saw Gerda Janicke making a face. I had obviously laid it on too thick. She sensed that I was not being honest, because she knew that I did not particularly like Jörg, the Little Teuton.

  I was already in bed when I heard steps making their way along the corridor, and then a quiet tap on my door. ‘Are you still awake?’ asked Gerda Janicke.

  ‘Yes.’ I sat up, expecting an explosion.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘I just want to ask you something. You see, I was fascinated by your story. I didn’t believe a word of it, but at the same time I was thinking: how can anyone can lie like that? Every detail sounds right, but as a whole it doesn’t. Will you tell me the real truth now?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I took a photograph that hadn’t been retouched, every detail of it true to life. But I removed it from its frame and put it in another one. I told you all about the life and character of my aunt Grete, but transferred to someone else.’

  ‘And what really happened?’ she asked.

  ‘I’d rather not talk about it. Something happened today that
’s weighing terribly on my mind.’

  She accepted that. She came even closer and sat down on the side of the sofa. ‘Hanni, I must say you’re a genius.’

  ‘Goodness no, Frau Janicke! There are far cleverer people than me about,’ I said, dismissing the idea.

  ‘But you are! The doctor said so himself the other day, and his wife nodded, so she agreed. He told me how fond of you he is. He may make fun of your school-leaving certificate, but only because he wants you to learn practical things.’

  That nocturnal conversation was a comfort, and it reconciled me with the Hellers. I didn’t yet know that I would never see them again.

  A few days later, Gerda Janicke went back to the gynaecologist’s practice. Eva looked after the toddler while she was out. She thought he was sweet, and the Little Teuton loved her like a second mother. He felt just as clearly that I didn’t like him, and he was afraid of me. It’s true that I sometimes felt like pinching him or calling him names. I felt unspeakably sad to think how many Jewish children had been murdered, and then I could hardly bear the sight of that crowing lump of flesh who loved his food so passionately, but was late learning to talk.

  ‘I’m worried,’ said Eva that afternoon. ‘Gerda’s been out for so long. Something must have happened.’ When Frau Janicke finally came home she was white as a sheet, in floods of tears and hardly able to speak. At last she told us, sobbing, that Heller had been arrested. Two officers had taken him away from his apartment. As usual, there had been several people there illegally, but the police hadn’t taken any further notice of them.

  We were shattered, all three of us, and we sat together for a long time, shedding tears. Then Gerda Janicke stood up, went to a calendar hanging on the wall and marked the date, 23 February, with a small line. ‘From now on we fight against all injustice.’ This was no time now for romantic effusions. ‘If you agree, Eva,’ she went on, ‘Hanni will eat with us now. I know that you’re paying a high price and a difficult one for your ration cards, but after this we’ll share everything.’

  ‘I’ve wanted it to be like that for a long time,’ Eva agreed at once. I thanked her with real feeling, and apologised for not always behaving well to her. And to mark this as a special day, we all had a cup of real coffee.

  But once we were sitting at the supper table, there was an air-raid warning. Gerda Janicke had asked Eva to light the bathroom stove because she and Eva wanted to have a bath, but now they had to go down to the air-raid shelter in the cellar. I didn’t go with them, because officially I wasn’t here at all. Eva was explained away as a friend who sometimes stayed the night.

  ‘Hanni, you have a bath,’ said Gerda Janicke. ‘Otherwise the bathroom stove will overheat.’ I jumped at the chance, got into the bath and made waves with both hands, playing around in the water. ‘I’m tipsy on coffee, tipsy on coffee,’ I chanted, and indeed the unaccustomed caffeine had left me slightly intoxicated.

  When the all clear had been given the other two came upstairs again. ‘You’re sitting pretty,’ said Frau Janicke reproachfully. ‘There were we, freezing down in the air-raid shelter, while you were wallowing in a nice warm tub.’

  That reminds me of a Soviet joke that I heard years later: crowds are standing outside a butcher’s shop, but no delivery of meat arrives. First the Jews in the crowd are sent away, then people who don’t live in the area, and after several hours more those who are not Party members. Finally the butcher comes out and says, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve just had a phone call and I’m afraid I must send you all home. There won’t be any meat delivered today.’ The crowd disperses, grumbling, ‘As usual, the Jews get first preference.’

  Gerda Janicke kept her word. She cared devotedly for Frau Heller, who had suffered a severe heart attack when her husband was arrested. Gerda went with her to her lawyer’s and to remand prison. Irmgard Heller also told her where all of us who had gone underground were staying – Cohn with Müller, Levy with Meyer, and so on. Frau Janicke went to see them all, told them what had happened, and found out what they knew. That was how we discovered why Heller had been arrested.

  A Jewish woman about thirty-five years old, and entirely non-political, had been persuaded to go to ground by the gynaecologist. He had sent her to stay with a grateful patient of his in Neukölln for two weeks. But once those two weeks were over, she didn’t want to leave. Her hostess told her she couldn’t possibly stay any longer. There were Nazis living all round her place. She had been telling people that her cousin from the country was visiting, but neighbours had already been telling her she ought to register her guest with the police.

  So the Jewish ‘non-swimmer’ had nowhere to go. She wandered around for several days and nights, hungry and freezing, with nowhere to wash or go to the toilet. She went back to the woman she had been staying with and asked, ‘Can you take me in again?’

  But her hostess refused. ‘I’m afraid it simply can’t be done,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ll tell you something: what I’ve been through in these last few days was so terrible that it can’t be worse in a concentration camp. I’m sure there are no creature comforts and the food isn’t restaurant standard, but at least I’d get thin soup and a straw mattress under the shelter of a roof. That doctor is a criminal, driving people into misfortune.’ And the woman did indeed go to the Gestapo, gave herself up of her own accord and denounced Heller. However, she never told them the name of the woman who had taken her in for those first two weeks.

  A little later Irmgard Heller went to live with her sister in Leipzig. She died there a few months later, in September 1943. She was suffering severely from heart trouble, and she had to assume that her husband was dead; the police had told her that on the way from the remand prison to Sachsenhausen, Benno Heller had been shot for resistance to the authority of the state. In fact, he was still alive early in 1945.*

  After Heller’s arrest, Jews who had gone to ground went on living in his apartment. Irmgard Heller had paid the rent for months in advance before leaving Berlin. They were supplied with food that Gerda Janicke begged from former patients of Heller’s, taking them to Braunauer Strasse in a small suitcase. This resistance struggle of hers became a full-time job, while Eva Deutschkron looked after her little boy.

  8

  Little girl

  All alone

  To the Hellers’ house has gone.

  What a fuss, who’s to blame?

  I must bear it all the same.

  As so often, I was singing to myself in my mind as I carried my suitcase from Schierker Strasse to Schönleinstrasse. It was a day late in February 1943. I wondered whether it was wicked to sing when Heller was possibly being tortured to death at this very minute. Then I adapted a little more of the ‘Hänschen klein’ nursery rhyme to suit my own situation.

  Never fear

  Be of good cheer

  Things may yet be better here.

  Anyway, I thought, what harm does it do anyone if I feel cheerful and optimistic? After all, something wonderful and extraordinary lay ahead: my meeting with the woman who had said she would be responsible for keeping me safe until the day of liberation came.

  Trude was at home and gave me a warm welcome. ‘Every day that passes is a day gained, and a day closer to our liberation,’ she declared. I felt at ease with that family at once. The living room where I slept on the sofa contained oddly assorted old pieces of furniture, but it looked very tasteful, because Trude had a brilliant sense of colour and avoided anything kitschy. The room also contained a small library of belles lettres and a desk.

  For the time being I was to spend about a week there. At first Trude wouldn’t let me help with the housework, but my fingers simply itched when I saw dishes waiting to be dried, so in the end she let me have my way. As she saw it, Camilla Fiochi was a mean-minded, despicable capitalist exploiter. When we talked about the villa in Zeuthen, she would swing her clenched fist belligerently through the air. ‘After the war, when it’s all over and there are trade unions again, y
ou must go to them and complain that you weren’t paid a proper wage!’ she announced. I thought that was absolutely absurd. ‘So what do you think of Camilla risking her neck for me, taking me in at such short notice, and feeding me even though I had no ration cards?’ I asked. Trude was magnanimous enough to listen to such arguments, and then to say, ‘Now that I think about it, I can see that you’re quite right.’

  The name of her neighbour on the same floor was Steinbeck. ‘That woman is stupidity incarnate, and a passionate Nazi,’ Trude told me. ‘And to make matters worse, she’s bosom friends with the most unpleasant female Nazi in the whole district.’ All the same, she wanted to introduce me to her neighbour as soon as possible; she didn’t want the woman to think she had something to hide. She openly took me shopping with her, and we made a lot of noise climbing the steps on the way back. The door to the neighbouring apartment promptly opened, and Frau Steinbeck looked out. ‘Someone else from Magdeburg,’ said Trude cheerfully, indicating me, ‘my cousin who’s come to spend a few days in Berlin.’

  ‘You have a never-ending number of relations,’ said Frau Steinbeck in amazement.

  ‘Yes, hundreds,’ joked Trude, and after a friendly handshake we went into the Neukes’ apartment. No sooner had Trude closed the door of the corridor than she put a finger to her lips. She knew that Frau Steinbeck was standing next door, listening. Only when we had closed the door into the hall and the door into the kitchen could we talk.

  I called the neighbour ‘that receding lady’, and Trude laughed herself silly. Frau Steinbeck had a receding forehead and a receding chin in front, and her hair and her bottom stuck out behind. She plucked at her hair to make it fly out behind even more, and she hollowed her back, emphasising her behind. She really was a comical figure.