Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  As I approached the little house that had once been my family’s holiday home, several different voices spoke up inside me. I hope nothing’s gone wrong, I hope the house hasn’t been bombed or damaged and the Kochs are all right, said one voice. You’re lying, another voice contradicted the first, you really hope the place is in ruins with the Kochs buried under them, and then you’d stand there crying your eyes out, but so far as you’re concerned that would be the end of it, and you wouldn’t have to be grateful to anyone. But that’s horrible of you, said the first voice, you have to hope the Kochs are all right, even if your relationship with them is difficult. And so it went on back and forth for quite some time. At a loss, I sat down on a tree stump.

  Frau Koch looked terrible. She was worn out, utterly exhausted. She had her daily work in the laundry, she also had to look after her house and garden, her husband and her old parents. She was spending her nights in what was called a slit trench, not an air-raid shelter but an open trench in a zigzag shape dug out on a large meadow near the Kochs’ house. It was open to the sky, and you sat in it on improvised wooden benches.

  But I sensed that Hannchen Koch was not just exhausted, she was also angry and hostile. She was not a bit pleased to see me. ‘My parents have been bombed out,’ she told me, ‘and now they’re living here too.’ In fact only her father was in the house. As it turned out later, he couldn’t be said to have been bombed out. He simply hadn’t known how to look after himself, and had made up the story about the bomb damage because his wife was mentally sick and in a state of total confusion. She had been going out on the streets stark naked in all seasons, and often couldn’t find her way home again. Hannchen’s father therefore broke a window pane that had been cracked for years, smashed some empty glasses and tipped the china cupboard over: that was the full extent of the ‘bomb damage’. He hadn’t broken the empty bottles on which he could get a deposit back, but stacked them carefully in a corner. It was an unintentionally comic spectacle staged by a desperate man.

  As the old man was convinced of the merits of natural healing, after moving into Hannchen’s house he had turned for advice to Professor Paul Vogler, director of the Naturopathic Hospital. He had come back from seeing him very disappointed: there was no herbal remedy to cure his wife’s condition. Committing her to the Wittenauer Heilanstalten* could no longer be avoided. The certificate to that effect was still lying on the table, and I read it too. It said, straight out, ‘Frau Guthmann is completely demented.’ Since then Adolf Guthmann had been regularly visiting his wife in the asylum, although the way to Reinickendorf was long and difficult.

  Herr Guthmann was as unenthusiastic about my arrival as I was to see him there. He was a staunch Nazi, although he had always been too miserly to join the National Socialist Party, and he was also a very unlikeable character who was constantly afraid of not getting his due. From the first moment, when we shook hands with friendly smiles, there was a deep mutual antipathy between us.

  He also thought it was only natural for his daughter to look after him, and often pointed out that he was, after all, living in his own daughter’s house. Nazi bastard, I thought, this is really my house, and you’ve only Aryanised it.† I must confess that I was wrong there, and full of hate as I was I did him an injustice. I had to try very hard to stay humane, because survival means not sinking to the level of your enemies.

  Of course the old man was an anti-Semite. That was part of his ideology. He told a story of how, as a child, he and some other boys had cut sticks to size, smeared them with birdlime to catch flies, and gone around the local farms praising the virtues of their fly-catching sticks, but he was the only one to express himself grammatically. A rich gentleman who looked like an entrepreneur or a businessman happened to pass by, praised his correct manner of speech and bought all his fly-catching sticks. ‘He was a Jew,’ growled Hannchen’s father. He made a face, showed the same revulsion as old Frau Blase in her reaction to that word.

  ‘So he wasn’t nice to you?’ I asked, pretending to innocence. The old man was surprised. ‘What a question! And you an intelligent person at that! No, he wasn’t just nice, he was charming. It was really moving.’ There was no way to argue with the man.

  A few days after my arrival in Kaulsdorf a telegram came from the hospital: sad to say, the patient Elisabeth Guthmann had died of heart failure. It was obvious to me that they didn’t want to go on feeding someone incurably ill. I knew already that murder was committed in psychiatric hospitals, even after the end of the Nazis’ ‘euthanasia’ operations.

  It was 4 April 1945, my twenty-third birthday. Frau Koch was very ruffled. ‘You’ll understand that I can’t give you a birthday present in these crazy circumstances,’ she told me aggressively, adding, ‘It’s as much as I can do to wish you a happy birthday.’

  ‘Of course I understand entirely. And many thanks for your birthday wishes,’ I replied. She was in a terrible situation, and so was I.

  The house was very crowded. There was just a small living room, with a door into the bedroom, as well as a verandah and a stuffy attic to be reached only by climbing a kind of chicken-house ladder. That was where I slept.

  During the day I had to hide. I sat in a corner of the room that had once been my parents’ bedroom as if nailed to the spot. I couldn’t be seen from outside there, even if anyone had looked straight through the window. I was condemned to total inactivity, and could do nothing to occupy my time but read the books I found in a Biedermeier-style glass-fronted cupboard in that room. Frau Koch would probably have liked to slap my face. She was worked half to death, and exhausted. Going shopping meant hours of torture, now that permission had been given for people to use all the coupons on their ration cards. ‘Buy what you like, as long as the supplies in the shops hold out,’ we were told. Hoarding was the order of the day.

  Sometimes I saw Hannchen Koch turn pale and hold on to a piece of furniture to keep herself from falling over. ‘No, it’s nothing,’ she groaned when I ran to support her. I was ashamed of myself for being unable to help her, but I also thought it was not of the least significance to keep all the floors sparkling clean in these topsy-turvy circumstances. Even sand crunching underfoot wouldn’t have bothered me.

  There was no wood available either, and thus no coffins. None the less, Frau Koch had taken it into her head to give her mother a dignified burial. She went all over the district to see if she could find a coffin somewhere. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry about all this,’ I said dutifully. ‘If only I could help you by going on some of those trips myself.’ But of course she could tell that, secretly, I was thinking: we are near the end of the most terrible war and the greatest murder of the Jews ever known in human history, and it is relatively unimportant whether a woman who has been mentally ill for decades is buried in a coffin or not. It seemed to me ridiculous for Hannchen Koch to be wearing herself out looking for one, cycling all over the place to see acquaintances of acquaintances, and now and then having to go into other people’s shelters because the air-raid warnings kept sounding.

  Once, we had potato dumplings and roast rabbit for Sunday lunch. That was a banquet by the standards of the time. Frau Koch had asked a neighbour to kill a rabbit for her. Her father, who hadn’t really been looked after properly for years, fell on it avidly. He talked about almost nothing but food anyway. The potato dumplings were a good size, he said, although they ought really to be as big as babies’ heads. In his greed he didn’t use cutlery but ate with his bare hands, swallowing a dumpling to the accompaniment of disgusting sounds. Emil was sitting at the table too, showing proper table manners and making a few remarks in his kind, friendly way. At that Frau Koch, whose temper was no longer in a normal state, told her husband off, suddenly rose from the table and kissed her father on both cheeks.

  I often thought that getting away from that place at last would be another kind of liberation. But I was dependent on the Kochs, so I sat on my chair and let Hannchen make poisonous comments: ‘I only wish I could
just sit about reading!’

  ‘Hannchen, please try to understand me. What can I do about it?’ I tried desperately to explain my situation to her. But she knew it herself. She simply no longer had her anger under control. I felt like an elephant compared to this delicate and utterly debilitated woman.

  Only gradually did I come to see that something else was troubling Hannchen Koch: when the war ended, so would my dependence on her. The splendid role of resistance heroine that this shy woman from humble origins had been playing for years would be over. She would be tending her garden, like the neighbours to right and left of her, and she would live without the fear of air raids, but also without any prospect of exciting events.

  At that time her wishes and dreams and mine, our thinking and feeling as a whole, were diametrically opposite. I longed for the liberation that she was bound to fear. That was why Frau Koch infuriated me, and that was why she couldn’t stand my presence.

  There was not only a slit trench in the large meadow opposite the Kochs’ house – it used to belong jointly to a Jewish community who had equal interests in it – but also several huts for prisoners of war and women forced labourers.* Most of the prisoners were Ukrainians, and they must have suffered much mistreatment. Their screams could be heard again and again, but most of the neighbours preferred not to notice. I had personal experience of the way they organised this failure to hear anything.

  A hit song that was often played on the radio at the time ran ‘My Sweetheart Takes Me Sailing on a Sunday’, sung by a woman who had a good soprano voice but lisped badly. One day the windows of the nearby houses were all open to let in the early spring air, and that song rang out of living rooms from all sides. Then, however, the screams of the tortured inmates of the prison camp were also heard – and all the windows closed at the same time as if by previous agreement. No one’s sweetheart wanted to take her sailing on a Sunday any more. Those were the same people who claimed, later, not to have known any of what was going on.

  Long before I arrived in Kaulsdorf, however, Emil Koch had been talking to the guards stationed at the fence of the camp. He had pointed to an old Ukrainian with a large moustache and said, ‘That old boy looks as if he could chop wood well. Can you send him over to me some time? I’m a German, I don’t have to do it for myself.’ And he had given the man on guard a couple of cigarettes. So the Ukrainian, whose name was Timofei, came over to the Kochs’ house. He didn’t speak a word of German, but they communicated somehow or other. Emil saw that he limped, and his face was distorted by pain. The Kochs got him to lie down on the sofa, took his shirt off, saw the bloody weals on his body, cooled them and gave him something to eat.

  From then on Emil often gave meatballs to the guard by the camp fence; Hannchen made them from the minced meat mixture that he smuggled home from his work with the fire brigade in the wax-cloth pouches of his vest. In exchange, the guard let him have the Ukrainian, allegedly to chop wood. Timofei was so grateful that he could be prevented only with difficulty from kneeling down to kiss the Kochs’ feet. He kissed the hands of everyone in the house.

  Two Polish women, Krystyna and Halina, also visited us regularly. They were forced labourers, and must have felt it was a miracle; they knew Germans only as slave-drivers, but here were friendly people who welcomed them warmly, gave them food and drink and respected them as human beings. Sometimes a French prisoner of war called Legret came visiting as well, and on occasion all four were invited at the same time. It was very cramped in the Kochs’ little living room then.

  Naturally I was present at such times myself; I was part of the household, and helped to pour the ersatz coffee while Hannchen Koch served potato cakes.

  One day Krystyna, who came from Krakow and had studied at a conservatory there, went over to the piano – the instrument that had come from my parents’ apartment. ‘You piano play?’ asked Frau Koch, in the way one addresses foreigners. ‘You “Chopsticks” know?’ Krystyna blushed. No, she didn’t know ‘Chopsticks’ and didn’t want to. Instead she played Mozart’s A major piano sonata. Our eyes met, and then I quickly looked away, because I didn’t want to put anyone to shame. But for a brief moment I had felt the strong bond that exists between people of culturally similar backgrounds.

  What future, however, was there for poor Frau Koch, overworked and worn almost to a skeleton? She, the resistance heroine now entertaining international guests, was to go back to the wallflower existence that had once been hers.

  Unfortunately, Hannchen Koch had an irrationally great and, as I saw it, totally disproportionate fear of bombs, and insisted on our going, every evening, to the bunker used as an air-raid centre in the next village but one. We couldn’t occupy the slit trench together while I was hiding in her house. With a scarf pulled well down over her eyes she set off with me, always taking care to avoid going close to houses where fanatical Nazis lived.

  It was several kilometres to this bunker, and we were always in a hurry because first she had to wash the dishes, mop the floor and go round with a duster. I could have slapped her for this pedantic good housekeeping. By the time we finally left the house she was panting with exhaustion. I had to drag her along behind me, hauling and half carrying her.

  The bunker had two separate entrances, but she insisted on our marching in together through the same one. Luckily, the checks at the entrance were only perfunctory; no one looked hard at my identity card with the faked photo and the other card certified by the postman, or it would have been obvious that the details given in the two identity cards were the same apart from the altered date of birth.

  The whole thing was an attempt at combined murder and suicide, since Hannchen Koch didn’t want her days of heroism to come to an end. And I thought: she is cancelling out all the fine things she’s done for me. It was much the same when she invited Else Pohl for a cup of ersatz coffee. That was in the last days of the war, when the approaching sound of battle had become our constant background music.

  Hannchen never usually asked women friends in; she didn’t have any. She was only on distant terms with her neighbours and her colleagues at work. Emil, however, had a few acquaintances, including Richard Pohl, Else’s husband, whom he had known since his schooldays. Else was mad about the paranormal. She devoured books on astrology, black magic and psychology, and just like Hannchen Koch had a love of anything mysterious, irrational and not subject to the dictates of reason. But she was also an avid Nazi, so you had to be careful if she came into your house. And now Hannchen Koch was inviting this of all women into hers.

  ‘I’ll just go into the cellar and read a book,’ was my suggestion for the duration of her visit. But for some senseless reason or other this simple solution was rejected. Hannchen had another plan; she banished me to a place only a little way from the small coffee table in the living room. The bedroom contained two beds that could be folded up lengthways, with a cleverly designed surrounding structure of my mother’s devising that acted to take lights and a bedside table. I was to get behind the curtain beside the beds, and make sure it didn’t bulge out by flattening myself against the mattresses. Hannchen insisted on leaving the connecting door between the bedroom and living room open, alleging that closed doors aroused suspicion.

  Else Pohl made it clear at the beginning of her visit that she was surprised by the invitation: people really had other things on their minds just now, she said, but since Hannchen Koch had asked her so nicely she thought she’d just look in. I was about three metres away, behind the curtain, hardly daring to breathe and forbidden to clear my throat, which of course made me want to cough. The conversation between the two women was about almost nothing. Frau Koch kept saying how nice it was for the two of them to be sitting there together. Her guest made several attempts to leave, but was persuaded to stay a little longer. The whole thing was staged to torment me. I stood behind the curtain, cursing to myself: silly cow, silly cow, silly cow.

  On another occasion Frau Koch had to busy herself at the smoking stove, stirr
ing up the fire with twigs to make soup. There was no gas now. As she did so she sang, unmusically and out of tune, the line from the former Austrian national anthem, now adopted by Germany, ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ [‘God save Emperor Franz’]. She couldn’t remember any more of it, but then she began lamenting the downfall of her fatherland. This uncompromising anti-Fascist fighter who had sacrificed herself to her beliefs for twelve years was not her usual self at all.

  Emil understood that and apologised to me for his wife; he forgave her everything and loved her with all her eccentricities. He himself had another problem. Before the Nazis came to power he had been a fireman, and he hoped to go back to that job after liberation. But he would have to choose the right moment to jettison his present uniform. Naturally he didn’t want to be taken prisoner by the Russians in a barracks under the command of German police. However, he mustn’t make his move so early that he might yet be reported to the field police or the Gestapo as a deserter. At just the right time he must cycle home, burn his uniform, find some old clothes to put on and then, limping a little, hope to pass muster as an old civilian. He did it, too.

  A kind of no-man’s-land period of time began. The camps on the big meadow began breaking up. One day the camp guards had simply gone away. The inmates could have walked out, but they didn’t know where to go.

  Then Emil said he had seen the marks of tank tracks in a woodland clearing. One tank must have arrived ahead of the others, although the Soviet army had not really reached the suburbs of Berlin yet. Emil told me where the place was, beside a small birch tree. I went there, found the tracks – and was greatly moved. I sat down calmly on the woodland floor and thought: this is a place where everything changes. This is where hope turns to confidence.