Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  I was very glad, but not stupidly cheerful or foolish. Saying goodbye to hope was sad, too. Hope had kept me going for years. Now fulfilment of that hope lay ahead. What would it bring me?

  When the war reached its very last stage, there were air-raid warnings almost continuously. I no longer hid from the neighbours. We didn’t go away to the bunker but lay in the slit trenches. I often sat there on one of the rough-and-ready benches for hours. My bones hurt. Frau Koch clung to me, and people talked a lot of stupid nonsense. In a rather foolish way, I was annoyed to see the war ending in so tediously banal a way, and finding that I was not part of the turmoil of battle.

  And then the moment came. Someone said, ‘It’s over. The Russians are here. We’d better come out.’* They all clambered out of the trenches with their hands up. I raised mine only slightly, because I was thinking: I didn’t have to surrender. I stood formally by the side of the defeated, but my feelings were with the victors.

  The Russian who faced me first was a picture-book example, a pock-marked Mongolian. I embraced him and thanked him in German for liberating us. This simple solder looked rather shocked. And I admitted to myself that I had been putting on a theatrical performance.

  I was free, the war was over, the Red Army had won. I would have liked to weep for joy and relief, but I felt no emotion at all.

  2

  The Polish women from the camp stormed through all the houses, breaking china and snatching up anything they could take with them. A pack of them was ransacking our house – but Krystyna and Halina suddenly appeared, stood protectively in front of Frau Koch, and quickly spoke to their countrywomen in loud voices: resistance fighters lived here, they said, people who had done good for years to Poles as well as others, and their house should be spared.

  It was like a witches’ sabbath. One of the women pulled Halina’s hair, another struck Krystyna in the face with both hands. I saw all this as if from a great distance, like a spectacle that was nothing to do with me.

  Then the Soviet soldiers came into the houses. A gigantically tall and corpulent man perched one of Frau Koch’s ridiculous little hats on his head, put on the tasteless, showy plush jacket that she had made for herself and went away in it. That struck me as immensely funny. But her father howled ‘Thieves!’ out loud like a child, his mouth wide open. You bloody Nazi, I thought, you and your like voted for Hitler, you backed him when he started this war, you obeyed when you were told to hold out. And now you get upset about a silly little hat. But of course I kept my mouth shut.

  Another soldier stormed into the cellar where old Guthmann did a trade breeding laboratory animals. He had trained as a purse maker, he later worked as a coal merchant and a park keeper, and now he supplemented his pension by selling white mice to the Charité hospital. He delivered the mice he had bred once a week.

  I was standing by the open cellar door when the Russian saw all the cages and immediately opened them. With solemn gravity, raising his hands as if in blessing, he kept repeating the word Ozvobožhdenie in a singsong voice, as if conjuring up a spirit. It meant ‘liberation’, and he was performing what seemed like a childish magical act. Then he began liberating the preserved fruits from the many jars on shelves along the cellar walls. He kept solemnly saying, ‘Ozvobožhdenie’, as he smashed jar after jar. The mice rolling round in cherry and strawberry compote were dyed red, and I could hardly contain my laughter. But Hannchen’s father was howling and shouting out loud. I felt like smashing my fist into his face.

  The bad part was that the Soviet soldiers also rampaged through the houses raping women. Naturally I was among them. I slept in the attic, where I was visited that night by a sturdy, friendly character called Ivan Dedoborez. I didn’t mind too much. Afterwards he wrote a note in pencil and left it on my door: this was his fiancée in here, it said, and everyone else was to leave her alone. In fact after that no one else did pester me.

  I heard from the floor below hysterical screaming and screeching: they had got to Frau Koch as well. Looking out of the window a little later, I saw a tall, slender and dazzlingly handsome man of Mediterranean appearance leaving the house. This Soviet soldier was clearly high-ranking, probably even an officer.

  That single, involuntary act of sexual intercourse had consequences, as it turned out weeks later. For decades Hannchen Koch had done her utmost to get pregnant, and now it had happened with that Russian.

  Perhaps part of the strange state of mind in which Hannchen Koch found herself just after the war was due to her hormones. She was obsessed for a while with the idea that she ought to take food to the Kochs’ neighbour, the worst and most dangerous Nazi in the whole area. After all, she reasoned, he must now be in terror of pursuit and punishment. In her crazed condition, she started making light conversation with this wholesale butcher on such subjects as the weather.

  ‘Oh, save your breath,’ said Emil, when she was talking to him about it. ‘You’re out of your mind. Those people have threatened and tormented us for twelve years. They’ve committed terrible crimes.’

  ‘But our Saviour …’ objected Hannchen. Then he simply picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. ‘Now, you lie down on the bed and discuss it with your Saviour. I’m sure he’ll agree with me.’ And he closed the door behind him.

  After a few days news began coming in from the liberated concentration camps. We heard the first numbers of the monstrous murders committed there. That brought even Hannchen to see sense, and she reverted to being the reliably anti-Fascist woman she had always been at heart.

  She clung to me in a way that troubled me very much. Once, when we were both in the kitchen, she dug the nails of all her five fingers into my flimsy summer dress. ‘Oh, do let go, don’t tear the clothes off me! I don’t have a spare set!’ I cried.

  ‘You’re my child. Promise you’ll never leave me, promise you’ll always stay with me and not push me back into the misery I came from,’ she begged.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied as calmly as possible. I couldn’t say no to her, but I felt terrible, because I was making a promise that I had absolutely no intention of keeping.

  Our liberators also came to our houses to get the white bands they wore inside their collars like cravats washed and ironed. It struck me that while I didn’t mind performing that service, did it well, and ought to regard it as a small way of thanking the Red Army for its great sacrifice in the fight against the most bloodthirsty regime of all time, I had not expected liberation to take exactly that form. After all, those who were really guilty could do such lowly tasks, I thought.

  Some of the men were very helpful, touchingly kind to children, and showed respect for the old. One fair-haired Russian who came to us to get his neckwear laundered particularly impressed me. He could speak a little broken German, and was intelligent and forthcoming; he came from Moscow, and in civil life was a chauffeur. I tried to tell him that I was very glad of the Red Army’s victory. He shook his head and said, ‘Nix good. Gitler kaput – Stalin toshe (also) kaput – democracy good.’

  Once, as I was walking through Kaulsdorf, I was picked up from the road along with several other people. The Russians handed each of us a rake, took us to a clearing in the wood and told us to rake it. I was furious: couldn’t I wear a notice round my neck saying that I was not one of the conquered Germans? All the others went on pointlessly raking the woodland floor for hours. I just propped my rake against a tree as soon as the Russian supervisor turned round and went away. If I’d been caught, I would have said I had to answer a call of nature. But no one was watching me, and that was the Russian way of doing things; if I didn’t get the work done, someone else would be told to do it instead.

  I don’t know who got on my nerves most, Frau Koch or her father. The hierarchy in the household was as follows: she was at the top, with her husband as her assistant. The two of them formed a pair. Then came her father, and I brought up the rear. Adolf Guthmann and I also comprised a couple, and had joint tasks to perform. For instance, we we
re sent off with a damask tablecloth to offer it to farmers in the east of the Brandenburg Mark in exchange for a sack of potatoes. We set out very early, since we had to go about twenty kilometres along woodland paths. I was afraid that horrible old man might make improper advances to me on the way, and preserved a civil but cold and uninviting distance. But he left me alone.

  However, on meeting acquaintances as we were still close to our own village, he shouted right across the road, ‘Saved her!’ He struck his chest with his fist, pointed his forefinger at himself and then at me. Since the people he was addressing had no idea what he meant, he added, pointing to me again, ‘This is a Jewish girl. I saved her and I’ve been hiding her.’ I found it a great effort not to punch this repulsive creature in the mouth.

  We were supposed to share another job. Frau Koch had a kind of washing machine, although it didn’t run on electricity. It was a large, drum-shaped boiler that you put over the heat, turning a crank to keep the laundry on the move as it simmered inside, and it was very hard work. I had offered to do the laundry on a washboard instead, but Frau Koch didn’t like that idea. It was a very hot day when the old man and I had to keep twenty or thirty kilos of wet laundry on the move, turning the crank all the time. After sharing that torment together, we felt far less hostile to each other. We took over from one another every few minutes and ended up dripping wet all over.

  Soon the forced labourers were sent away. The Polish girls and women marched out of Kaulsdorf in a wide column. The procession passed the Kochs’ property. I was surprised to see how many Poles had been held in that camp.

  Earlier, there had been a warm farewell from Halina and Krystyna. But now Frau Koch staged a highly embarrassing scene. The long column was just turning the corner of the road. We had been waving to it, and our two Polish friends had kept turning to wave back. Now Frau Koch, just a few seconds too late, pretended to faint away. She cried, ‘Never forget Germany,’ and with a little sigh let herself drop to the ground, closing her eyes. However, I could see that she was peering out from under her eyelids so that she could take in her surroundings and all that went on around her.

  Emil impressed me greatly at that moment. He had seen exactly what was going on, but in a serious and very masculine style he gave me a glance that told me not to laugh. He was sorry for his wife, but couldn’t quite keep a note of irony out of his voice as he said, ‘Oh God, Hannchen’s fallen down in a faint. Now we’ll have to get her indoors. I’ll take her head, you take her legs.’ And so we carried her into the house.

  The hunger was hard to bear. At first there were no ration cards at all for the three suburbs of Biesdorf, Kaulsdorf and Mahlsdorf. Because the word Dorf means village, and there was still a kind of village centre in each with a church and a few fields nearby, the Soviet administration initially assumed that they were self-sufficient and could provide their own food. It was only after a couple of months that a German of Russian descent, a committed communist from Kaulsdorf, managed to explain the situation, and at last we got ration coupons.

  The Soviet soldiers were enormously amused to see the people of Kaulsdorf eating spinach and rhubarb, which was all that grew in their gardens early in the summer. They were unacquainted with those plants, and thought they were not food for human beings but animal fodder. On the other hand, they confiscated everything that anyone tried to hide. The wholesale butcher next door, for instance, had stored large amounts of processed meat and sausage in a small, walled-up enclosure. A soldier stormed into his cellar with an axe and broke it open. I felt as if he had marched from the Urals straight to that hidden supply of food. It was all taken away in a truck. The Russians went through the gardens with long sticks, and unearthed several buried crates containing valuables or uniforms.

  After the inmates of the camps had left, local people rushed in to see if there were any provisions left. Emil Koch brought home two drawers, one full of flour, the other containing a yellowish powder which Frau Koch made into a strong, sharp-tasting roux without any fat. As Emil then found out, it was a wartime blancmange powder of poor quality. We were half-starved, so we ate the roux as a sauce with the tiny agaric mushrooms that grew in the fields. They were not a poisonous species, but not really nice to eat either. I munched dandelion leaves and ate the tiny apples, no larger than marbles, that fell from the tree in early summer. ‘You’re eating all my fruit crop,’ said Frau Koch venomously. We were both under great strain.

  Some people did starve to death in those first post-war months. Emil kept us alive. When the Russians set up an improvised bakery nearby, he immediately volunteered to help as an assistant baker, and he was rewarded for his hard work with a loaf of dark brown bread.

  Diarrhoea was rife. Half-starved people couldn’t really afford to suffer from it, but old Guthmann and I both contracted the infection. It lasted only a few days, and in normal circumstances could have been cured by a couple of pills. But I had to go to the toilet every five minutes, and that primitive character Guthmann came beating on the door with both fists. ‘Tell that foreign girl to come out at once, this is my shithouse.’ I took to spending most of the day in the woods, equipped with rhubarb leaves, which made excellent toilet paper.

  I was nothing but skin and bone, and so thin that I felt I was floating rather than walking, as if I weighed nothing and the wind was blowing me forward. I had a great need to sleep. Once I was shocked to find that I didn’t wake up in my attic room until the sun was high in the sky. I had no watch, didn’t know how late it was and hastily climbed down the henhouse ladder. Old Guthmann was standing at the bottom of it, mocking me as a lazybones. It was humiliating.

  I told Emil about his rudeness, and from then on Emil climbed up to me every morning and woke me at a time when I wouldn’t meet the old man.

  Early one morning, I was in my attic when I heard a horribly familiar voice calling, ‘Frauke!’ from the garden fence. I hadn’t expected ever to see Burgers again in my life. I had never told him Hannchen Koch’s name or where she lived, and in the Blase household she was referred to simply as my friend. But he must have searched my handbag, found the identity card, noticed the name Johanna Koch, and discovered her address.

  ‘Emil, get a pitchfork and throw him out,’ I called crossly down from my attic. ‘That’s the man I was living with, and he gave me a black eye more than once.’ But immediately I felt ashamed. This is no way to behave, I told myself, I want to be back in civilisation.

  ‘Well, he won’t be giving you a black eye now, not after liberation,’ replied Emil calmly. ‘And that’s no way to say goodbye to someone you lived with for nearly two years. There must have been good times, too.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said in a small voice, and climbed down the ladder. Burgers was standing there in the suit he had been wearing when I first met him, with his crazy wide-brimmed hat and the briefcase slung round him, knocking at his chest with every step he took. He looked at me with large, sad eyes.

  ‘Sorry I sounded so cross,’ I said. ‘I’m under a lot of strain. Let’s talk for a few moments.’

  He told me that he was living in shared accommodation hardly an hour’s walk from Kaulsdorf, and said that the Dutchmen were about to go home very soon.

  ‘Go to where he’s living and you can say goodbye at your leisure,’ Emil advised me. We set off and sat down in the woods together. I hadn’t expected what came next, but it was heart-warming, and very nice. ‘Come to Holland with me,’ Gerrit asked.

  ‘No, I want to stay here in my home …’ I began, and then corrected myself; I didn’t really want to claim Germany as my homeland. ‘I want to stay in Berlin where I was born. I may still have some acquaintances here, and I know the language. But I’d like to thank you for all you did for me.’

  We talked for at least an hour, and felt that there was a bond between us. He wept, and I wanted to shed at least a tear for him, but I couldn’t manage it. As a souvenir he gave me a little metal box with footballers in relief on it.

  ‘
It’s not nice to be laughed at,’ I said, ‘and it’s hard to bear it when other people are triumphant. Don’t tell anyone back in the Netherlands that I didn’t want to come with you. Just say you don’t know my name and address, I got caught up in all the confusion of wartime, and I can’t get in touch with you because you never thought of giving me your home address.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he replied. ‘That’s what I’ll do.’

  Then he said something that I’d never have thought possible. ‘You must get away from those Kochs,’ he said. ‘It must be terrible for you.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ I asked. ‘She’s the friend who gave me her papers.’ I enumerated all that Frau Koch had done for me.

  ‘And whenever you came home with food, you talked like a schoolgirl,’ Burgers remembered. ‘It was as if you were reciting a poem you’d learned by heart, saying what good people your friends were. But all the same it must have been unbearable for you.’

  So I told him how I felt bound to Hannchen Koch by my promise, and said that I couldn’t just abandon someone who had acted as she did. He offered to help me, saying he would tell the Kochs that I was going to Holland with him, and then I could go to other acquaintances. ‘I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘I want to stay here; I’m not emigrating to Australia. I’d be bound to cross their path sooner or later.’

  It was some time, after all, before the column of Dutchmen set off to march home. Gerrit and I met two or three times more and went walking together. In the end we said a warm goodbye, and wished one another luck with genuine goodwill.

  I took every opportunity to get out of the house and do something useful, so I thought of gathering rabbit food. I went out with a large bag; I could go for a nice, long walk, and be praised when I came back with dandelion leaves to feed the rabbits. One day, unfortunately, the rabbits were all stolen – everyone would steal from anyone else at the time. But after a few days Emil bought some new young rabbits, and I could go back to collecting food for them.