Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  I was a thorn in her flesh from the first. She was a Nazi, suspicious by nature, and she had it in for me. Once again I wondered whether any tolerable situation that I had laboriously created for myself could last in the long run. But after a few days she appeared with her eyes red from weeping. ‘I’m leaving, my husband is going to the front,’ she said. And luckily that was the end of that.

  ‘Mother Blase,’ I said affectionately to our landlady, ‘she was a harmless woman. But suppose you’d opened the door to a robber? The foreign workers around here are riff-raff, you’re always saying so yourself! Someone like that could knock you over and rob you blind. You must never open the door again if I’m not here!’

  Our landlady thanked me for the warning, and agreed that she had been lucky yet again. We decided on a way for Kurt to ring the bell showing that it was him. He reinforced her in her belief that she should take my warnings seriously. For all his love for his mother, Kurt was now loyal to both sides. He would never have done anything to hurt me.

  Now and then Frau Blase received letters, although she never wrote to anyone. She couldn’t, and not just because of her poor eyesight. For instance, on her birthday a card arrived from Anna Ziervogel, the little sister of Gerhard’s fiancée, Gerhard being the son whom Frau Blase had loved so dearly and who had fallen at the front. The fiancée had obviously consoled herself with someone else in short order, and never got in touch again. Anna Ziervogel seemed very indignant about that, and even sent Luise Blase a poem that she had written herself.

  In me, Frau Blase had someone who could reply to such letters, and so a lively correspondence developed between me and Anna Ziervogel. Of course I always replied on behalf of Luise Blase and signed the letters with her name. Once I even wrote a serious poem about the feelings and thoughts of an old woman. Anna liked it, and wanted to meet me – I mean the old lady – but she lived far away in Pomerania. Furthermore, she was a great admirer of the Führer and believed firmly in the Final Victory. As a farmer’s daughter, she had no idea how dependent we were on our meagre rations of food in the city. So I sent her one of the wartime recipes that were good for nothing but making inadequate ingredients into barely edible dishes.

  Soon after that a huge parcel full of the best cake arrived from Anna Ziervogel. Frau Blase was enchanted, not so much by the cake itself – she hardly ate anything these days – as by having it in her possession. Snatching things and owning them was in her nature, but so was giving them away, and she gave me half the parcel of cake.

  I didn’t touch it until Burgers came home, and then I let him taste it first. The cake was delicious, he said, but his wartime bread moistened with ersatz coffee and spread with sugar was even sweeter and just as nice.

  After that I tried my first piece of cake, and I suddenly found myself in tears. ‘What’s the matter?’ Gerrit asked me in surprise.

  It was the only occasion in all this time that I had cried, and I was ashamed of myself. I hadn’t even shed tears when my relations were taken away to the death camp. But now I couldn’t keep back the tears.

  ‘I’m crying for joy,’ I said. That cake was a delicacy such as I couldn’t have imagined any more. And that made me happy; once again, I suddenly felt how good life could be.

  At first I meant to take Hannchen Koch a piece of the cake, but I wasn’t going to see her until a few days later, and by that time it was almost finished. Perhaps it was better that she didn’t know I had access to such luxuries. She was not free from envy; she wanted me to be poor, dependent and in need, so that she could caress and console me.

  Frau Blase also told me a great deal about the time when she had been taken to the Virchow hospital because of her eye trouble. She described all her fellow patients and the nurses in detail. I felt a particular interest in one of them: a Frau Krause, obviously an inveterate communist who worked as a caretaker in Schöneberg.

  When Frau Blase asked me to find out how this woman was now I was keen to meet her. It took me some time to find the entrance to her apartment, because the door was inside the gateway leading from the street to the yard of the building.

  This would be a good place to hide, I thought. Then I rang the bell. No one answered it, but a few moments later a woman came across the yard, making for the door.

  ‘Good day, I’ve come from Luise Blase and wanted to visit you and ask how you are,’ I said. As soon as I said the name her face darkened.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘but I don’t have any time to spare. I have this huge building to look after.’

  She was going to close the door in my face. ‘Wait a moment,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m lodging with Frau Blase for a very particular reason, but I’d feel embarrassed for you to assume I share her political opinions, far from it!’

  ‘Oh, come in, do. There’s not really any such thing as having no time, you can always make some,’ said the woman suddenly in very friendly tones. She led me into her kitchen, where I saw photographs of her husband and son, who had both fallen in the war. Once again I found myself sitting in a wicker chair, and then we had a long talk about politics.

  ‘You’re very trustworthy,’ I said after a little while, ‘so now I’ll tell you my own story.’ And once again I served up Trude’s brilliant half-lie: I was partly Jewish, and had been in trouble because of that, so I had gone to ground in Frau Blase’s apartment. The old woman clapped her hands happily when she heard that. She was happy as a child to think of that old Nazi Luise Blase helping someone who had gone underground. Then I plucked up my courage. ‘If anything catastrophic happens,’ I asked her, ‘would you by any chance take me in here?’ Frau Krause slapped her thighs enthusiastically with her fat little pat-a-cake hands. ‘Why, yes! For a while, certainly, and then we’d find somewhere for you.’

  Finally, she invited me to come and see her again soon. I went away in a good humour. In fact I felt so good that I caught myself hopping along on my way home. Grown-up people don’t do things like that, I told myself severely. On the other hand, the Gestapo were hardly going to ask to see my papers just for hopping a few steps in the street.

  6

  I heard the first news of the events of 20 July 1944 from a foreign radio transmitter. I was standing by the crystal set on the wall of our room, and I got very excited. I kept close to the radio for hours, trying to find out more. But the foreign radio stations had only the same sparse information as German radio: there had been an attempted coup d’état by German officers, but they had not succeeded in assassinating Hitler.

  At first the news depressed me deeply. For a moment liberation through the removal of Hitler had come so close, yet it had failed after all. Then I thought perhaps it was for the best. The officers planning the assassination had never blamed Hitler for starting the war; they blamed him now because he was losing it. They disliked him because he was vulgar and plebeian, and did not come from their own background of the old aristocracy and traditional army circles. They were not really anti-Fascists but conservative military men. I told myself that a successful attempt to end the war at five minutes to midnight would have been a lazy compromise. Germany must be entirely conquered, the Russians and the other Allies must march in, the Red Flag must fly over Berlin. When Burgers came home from work that evening we talked about it for a long time, and he saw it in exactly the same way as I did.

  The only people with whom we could discuss such subjects openly were Jule and Trude Neuke. We were still visiting them every other week, and sometimes I was counting the days and the hours to our next meeting. Now our exchange of opinions was particularly important to me.

  Without any forebodings and full of anticipation, I hurried up the steps of Number 13 Schönleinstrasse on the Saturday afternoon of our next visit. Julius opened the door in silence. Still silently, he steered us through the hall and into the kitchen. We waited in the doorway while he went over to the window, sat down on a chair, picked up a cobbler’s anvil and hammered wildly away at a shoe. A warm summer wind was blowing in fro
m outside.

  Burgers and I looked at each other with a question in our eyes. Jule didn’t say hello, he didn’t ask us to sit down, he gave no explanation for his behaviour. His face had frozen in a kind of furious grimace. Only after a long, tormenting delay, during which we watched, baffled, as he worked away at the shoe on the cobbler’s anvil, did he put his tool down and look at us. All he said was, ‘Trude’s been arrested.’*

  It was like a bolt from the blue. There wasn’t much to discuss, and Jule himself didn’t know any details yet. What it meant to us was clear: we must keep away from Schönleinstrasse in the immediate future. Only after four to six weeks might Jule know more: whether their apartment was under observation, whether nearby buildings were being searched, and where Trude was. After that time Gerrit would go to see him alone to find out what he knew about the situation. Gerrit was not in as much danger as I, since he was in Berlin legally.

  Later we discovered that Jule was not injured. Even when men came to arrest his wife they had treated him as if he wasn’t there. ‘Not you,’ was all they had said to him. Trude had always told her group that she didn’t want her husband to know anything about her political work. He couldn’t stand the nervous strain of it, she had said, and in the end he would blame her for thinking of politics instead of making him Sunday lunch. Obviously the informer who finally denounced the group had believed what she said.

  In the late autumn of 1944 we resumed our regular visits to Jule Neuke. He was in a wretched state, suffering from dreadful anxiety about his wife, from the responsibility for his two stepchildren, and the terrible pain of his leg ulcers. He was also in financial difficulty. There wasn’t much that we could do for him except bring him half a loaf every time we visited.

  Meanwhile the war went on. The newspapers were full of death notices, and I registered the different ways in which they were phrased. If the wording said that the son of a family had died ‘for the Führer, the People and the Fatherland’, then it was clear that Nazis had written it. But there were other notices, such as one from a family in Charlottenburg saying, ‘The Lord God has taken our daughter from us.’ The young woman had died in an air raid. The same death notice remembered a beloved maidservant who had been one of the family. Reading between the lines, you could tell that it contained a clear anti-Nazi statement, but phrased in such a way that the authorities could not take exception to it. I noticed the names and the family’s address, and thought that if I were in need I would go to them. They would probably help me.

  Luise Blase’s two half-sisters, Klara Kalliwoda and Anna Zouplna, had also been bombed out. They both asked if they could stay in the apartment at Am Oberbaum – after years or even decades in which they had not been in touch with Frau Blase. The old woman got rid of them by saying that both her rooms were rented out, one to a foreign worker from the Netherlands and the other to a young woman.

  One day, however, Kurt came to the door. The building where he lived had been completely destroyed. The whole family – father, mother and three children – were there in our kitchen needing new accommodation. And Trudchen was pregnant again. This time danger really did threaten; after all, Kurt knew that there was a vacant room in the apartment.

  We immediately made eye contact with each other. He shook his head very slightly, and I responded almost imperceptibly myself: please don’t, was the message. We both knew that if Frau Blase had to live with her detested daughter-in-law, who spent her time sitting on the coal-box smoking, the outcome would be disastrous. But it was likely that Trudchen would want to move into the Am Oberbaum apartment while the Dutch lodger was turned out to fend for himself. Burgers and I were already anxious enough over the rumour that foreign workers would no longer be allowed to live privately as lodgers, but should move into collective accommodation.

  It was obviously difficult for Frau Blase to tell her son that she didn’t have enough room for his whole family. But Kurt didn’t mind. After that conversation he came to see me and ask me to write a letter to the Nazi Party, explaining that he had been bombed out, had many children, and was asking for preferential treatment in his application for another apartment. For the only time in my life, I signed off with the official ‘Heil Hitler!’ formula. And he did very soon get a new place to live, although once again it was freezing cold.

  In spite of everything life went on, and even became almost a normal everyday round. I regularly visited Frau Rose and swapped soap coupons for bread coupons, and I met Hannchen Koch once a week. Burgers too had several acquaintances among his colleagues at work.

  One of them was Erich Klahn. Soon after beginning to work where he was now employed, the Dutchman had made friends with him. Klahn was an anti-Nazi, and from the first had been particularly inclined to like Burgers, his only non-German colleague. They had soon found that they shared political opinions, and they trusted each other. That was how Burgers had also discovered that Klahn was a retired burglar. For years he had made his living by breaking into properties and stealing from them, and he had never been caught. Then he contracted severe stomach trouble, and now, after several operations, he could do only light, part-time work. That was the end of his career in burglary.

  Because of his stomach trouble, Klahn could eat hardly anything. But he didn’t want to take the sandwich he brought to work home again for fear of his wife’s sharp tongue. So he often gave it to his Dutch colleague, who was surprised and pleased. Burgers was always hungry.

  Finally, Klahn was off work sick for a long time, and when he came back to collect his pay packet he told Burgers that he would like to meet me. He gave a curious reason: he wanted to learn how to solve equations with two unknown quantities, he said. Burgers had told him about me, boasting of my superior education.

  Klahn suggested a bench in Treptower Park for our meeting, and when I arrived I was considerably taken aback. True, Burgers had always described Klahn in Dutch as ‘the little man’, but he hadn’t told me that his friend was in fact a dwarf. He had a normal upper body and an intelligent face, but his lower limbs were tiny.

  I was furious with Burgers for failing to warn me, but I quickly found a way to disguise my shock; I knew that there are berakhot, Hebrew blessings, to be spoken at the sight of a giant or a dwarf. I didn’t know what they were, but I improvised with the usual introductory phrase of a Hebrew prayer, Boruch atoh Adaunoi – ‘Praised be he’ – and then went on, ‘Praised be he who has made very small people.’

  After that we got on very well. ‘My friend Gerrit has hinted at funny things. He says you’re not registered with the police; is there any special reason?’ Klahn asked right at the start of our conversation. I gave him a vague, evasive answer.

  ‘You know what they do to Jews, girl?’ he asked, and then went on, ‘They take them away to the East. And do you know what that means? It means murder.’ He shook himself and repeated, ‘Murder, yes!’ At that I told him the entire half-truth; I was half Jewish, so I had had to go into hiding.

  ‘Is the old woman, your landlady, happy about that?’ he asked. And he immediately began thinking how he could help me. He was still in touch with men who had gone breaking and entering in his company, he said, but even in those circles you couldn’t be sure you were safe from idiotic Nazi prejudices these days. So if I needed somewhere else to go, it would be better to say I had to disappear for a while because I’d been standing guard for a burglar breaking in somewhere.

  Then, drawing in the sand with a stick, I taught him, as well as I could, how to solve equations with two unknown quantities. We met several more times in Treptower Park. The retired burglar turned out to be something of an intellectual; during his long stays in hospital he had read his way through whole libraries. It was clear to him that the Nazis made anti-Semitism the core of their ideology, and he had wondered: where does this hatred of the Jews come from? He had engaged the hospital doctors in conversation, borrowed books from their private libraries, and in that way acquired a good knowledge of theology and church histor
y. He had come to the conclusion that the roots of anti-Semitism lay in Christianity.

  Erich Klahn also told me a good deal about his life. His first marriage had been to a handsome woman of normal stature who ill-treated him shockingly. There was a son of this marriage, now grown-up and in prison. He too had been a professional criminal. He had joined a gang that specialised in breaking and entering, but also went in for robbery with violence. Klahn didn’t like the latter at all. In a drunken state, his son’s gang had once stormed a kiosk to get their hands on schnapps. When the police stepped in there had been an exchange of shots, a subject on which Klahn waxed morally indignant. As he saw it, breaking in was a legitimate way to acquire property, but he categorically rejected the use of violence. He hated the sight of blood, and almost fainted if he saw anyone even slightly injured. I had never imagined a criminal being so sensitive.

  Klahn’s second marriage was to a dwarf like himself, a brutish, dull-witted woman who hated her husband. As he kept wanting to meet me, I began to be afraid of the relationship’s taking a form that would be very unwelcome to me. I was vulnerable to blackmail, and the idea that Klahn might become importunate was unbearable. In addition his Nazi wife could do me a great deal of damage if she found out the truth about me.

  Burgers, usually very jealous, suspected nothing in this case. Cautiously, I had to make it clear to him that he ought not to force the relationship between me and his colleague at work to go any further. However, we did pay a visit to the Klahns, who lived near Görlitzer Station in a building with many back yards.