Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  Once, when I was doing that, I came upon several groups of Frenchmen sitting at the side of the meadow. They were assembling here for the imminent trek back to France, and they were busy throwing their German money on bonfires: at home, the notes wouldn’t be worth anything.* Jokingly, they called out something to me in French. They probably didn’t expect me to understand it, because I was barefoot and looked like any simple farmer’s daughter. Wouldn’t I like to lift my skirt, they asked, collect the money in it and take the notes away before they burned them?

  They were surprised when I shook my head and replied with something amusing in French. They repeated their offer a couple of times, but I decided I would rather go on filling my bag with rabbit food than lift the hem of my skirt. So I watched the banknotes, which would have been legal currency in Germany for some years yet, go up in flames.

  Johanna (Hannchen) Koch, who lent Marie Jalowicz her identity for three years, c.1945.

  Later I was very cross with myself for not taking the money. At the time a bread roll or a cube of margarine cost hundreds at black-market prices. Only a few months earlier, when I was still living underground, such a decision would have put me in mortal danger. But looking on the positive side, those times were over.

  Hannchen Koch had always wanted a baby, and now, for the first and only time in her life, she was pregnant by that one act of sexual intercourse with a Russian. Many women of child-bearing age soon felt the same consequences.

  In our neighbourhood there was a practising doctor by the name of Hering, and the residents all went to her. This doctor, an ardent supporter of Nazi principles, was of course a passionate opponent of abortion. But now she was carrying them out as if on a conveyor belt: German women must not bear children by the enemy – such was the ideology.

  The doctor performed these operations two days a week, with a younger male colleague as her assistant. Afterwards, the women were taken home by their husbands in padded handcarts.

  Frau Koch applied to her when the necessity became obvious. On the morning when Emil took his wife to the doctor, I knew that this would not be a good day for me. I must be at Emil Koch’s disposal – and I hoped to God for the last time. For in spite of the friendship between us, he identified me with the Russians whom I loved as my liberators. I must pay for what they had done to his wife.

  It wasn’t the first time. The relationship between Frau Koch and my father, many years ago, had been extraordinarily hard on Emil. And I had already paid for it then. He was the first, when I was still going to school and my mother was alive. I thought it was horrible. He had always proved to be humane, totally anti-Fascist and faithful to us, but I had paid the price, and I secretly hated him for that.

  None the less, Emil was much more normal than his wife, and he was a decent human being. When it was over, he asked, ‘Why did we do that? I felt as though we had to, but it was no fun for me, and I don’t suppose it was for you either.’

  ‘That’s the way life sometimes goes,’ was all I said.

  3

  Emil Koch heard a good deal that wasn’t in the newspapers from his acquaintances, and they in turn heard more from theirs. People who worked as truck drivers or canteen waitresses quickly learned what was going on among the higher functionaries and in the administrative departments. And so, once the Americans and British had moved into Berlin at the beginning of July, Emil found out that the municipal authority had set up a new translation service and needed people to work for it. He suggested that I should apply. Well, I couldn’t go on picking rabbit food for ever.

  There was a bus running from our suburbs to the city centre now, although I had to walk for a long way through the woods to reach the bus stop. The buses themselves were crammed full, with people hanging from them like bunches of grapes. I let several buses pass before I ventured to board one and make the journey; after all, I didn’t want to risk my life at this late stage.

  I was pretty well exhausted when I finally reached the city council buildings. The translation service’s office was near Klosterstrasse. I was seen by a British or American lieutenant. As it turned out, he was a German Jew who had emigrated at the last moment.

  He was just finishing his breakfast, and had a half-empty cup of coffee in front of him – real coffee, made from coffee beans – as well as a plate of sliced bread. I had to bend my head so as not to show that my mouth was watering. It was white bread, white as snow, the kind I hadn’t seen for ages, buttered and even with another spread on top of the butter: an unimaginable delicacy.

  We spoke a bit of French together first, but when he changed to English I dried up. I was so hungry that everything was going black in front of my eyes. At that moment a maid put her head round the door and asked if she could clear away now. With a nasty grin he tipped the contents of an over-full ashtray on the remains of his beautiful breakfast and said, ‘Yes, take it away, I’ve had enough.’ I could have screamed and slapped this officious character’s face on both cheeks. A man who acts like that, I thought, should be tried in an international Jewish people’s court and given a severe sentence.

  Smiling unpleasantly, he helped me out with the English word that I hadn’t been able to find. ‘So you speak a little French but hardly any English,’ he said, adding in a very superior tone of voice, ‘And if my idea of you is correct, you can’t touch-type either; I guess you use two fingers.’

  ‘You guess right,’ I said. But ultimately none of that mattered to him. I was to start at once, and I was paid at once too. I was to sit at a typewriter in a large room typing out French and English texts. My colleagues were two or three young girls who had been to language school. They talked and giggled the whole time, and said that as we were all getting on so well, shouldn’t we call each other du? ‘No,’ I said rather brusquely. ‘I won’t be staying long.’ I couldn’t simply fraternise so easily with these girls, or whatever the equivalent is with sisters, not when they might have been members of the League of German Girls only a few months ago.

  When they took out their sandwiches they asked where mine were. I replied brusquely again, hoping to get them to call me by the formal pronoun Sie.

  ‘But mothers always send one to work with something to eat!’ said one of them.

  ‘I don’t have parents any more. I’m entirely on my own,’ I explained. They looked at me sadly, shocked.

  I arrived late on every one of the few days I spent working there. I got up very early, but then I had to wait ages for a bus that wasn’t overcrowded with passengers. I typed very slowly and made a great many typing mistakes. I could see for myself that my work was a dead loss for my employers, who were throwing money away. So I soon went back to the lieutenant and asked to end our agreement.

  However, I had been earning pretty well, and at last I could repay the Kochs some money. I didn’t tell them that I had given in my notice. I went on starting out early in the morning, and then lay down in the woods to sleep for another hour or so. Then I went into the city centre. I desperately wanted to find out which of my friends and acquaintances were still alive, and how I could find my way back into a normal, legal life. I was particularly interested to know whether the university still existed and if you could enrol there again.

  Once, before the bus began running again, I had gone on foot to the city centre. Then I had taken the U-Bahn, or the part of the line from Alexanderplatz towards Pankow that came back into service in May 1945. My first visit was to be to my uncle Karl Jalowicz. I wanted to find out whether he had survived as soon as I could.

  Even from a distance I saw that his house at Number 2 Berliner Strasse was still standing. I raced excitedly up the steps. And then I saw him in the doorway: Karl was just saying goodbye to a woman patient who had had a dental appointment with him. Although he had had to use improvised methods, he had reopened his practice immediately after the end of the war.

  ‘Mariechen!’ he cried when he saw me, with delight such as I’d never known in anyone before. Not only was his whole
face beaming, the whole stairway seemed to be brightly lit all of a sudden. It was wonderful.

  I was also anxious to register myself as soon as possible with the Jewish Community at Number 8 Oranienburger Strasse.* On the way there I met Mirjam Grunwald at the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station. My former classmate – the one who had borrowed Eva Deutschkron’s husband – had also survived. She had jaundice, she was yellow in the face, and I felt terribly sorry for her. The hope of seeing her mother again had kept her going all those difficult years. And then the first news to reach her from the United States was that her mother had just died. After we had exchanged a few friendly words, Mirjam smiled her familiar bitter-sweet smile and said, ‘You’re still the same as ever.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Untidy, untidy, a strand of your hair has come loose,’ she said reprovingly, tugging it. ‘If I had a pair of scissors I’d cut it off.’ I made haste to say goodbye.

  Only a little way further on, the next person I met was Edith Rödelsheimer. The musicologist with whom I had done forced labour at the Siemens works was coming towards me in Münzstrasse. When she saw me she simply dropped her handbag in the road. We hugged joyfully. Edith and her husband had been hiding in a summerhouse belonging to non-Jewish friends. She told me that during the week, when the owners of the allotment garden and its summerhouse weren’t there, they hardly dared to move, and they couldn’t cook anything for fear of steaming up the window panes on the inside.

  A villa belonging to the most powerful Nazi in this residential area was in the immediate vicinity of the summerhouse. Sometimes they had seen people going into and out of the house late in the evening or early in the morning, and feared that they were under observation. Only at the end of the war did they discover that half a dozen Jews who had gone underground were living in the supposed Nazi’s villa. These Jews, in their turn, were terrified of the people hiding in the summerhouse.

  Feeling very excited, I soon went to Kreuzberg to find out what had happened to Trude Neuke and her family. When I turned into Schönleinstrasse, I breathed a sigh of relief. There were no gaps in the row of buildings. I ran up the steps to the door of the Neukes’ apartment, but there I had a terrible shock. I leaned against the wall, weak at the knees. The Neukes’ familiar oval porcelain nameplate was gone, and there was someone else’s name on the door.

  I could only ring the Steinbecks’ bell. Trude’s former neighbour opened the door. ‘Hello. I’m glad to see you haven’t been bombed out,’ I said politely. ‘Can you tell me what’s happened to the Neukes?’

  Gertrud (Trude) Neuke, aged thirty-eight, in the summer of 1945.

  ‘She came back. They’re in the grandest part of Kreuzberg now, they’re living in Urbanstrasse,’ she replied in unfriendly tones. That was the way such people thought: in the old days the Neukes had been at the bottom of the heap and the Steinbecks at the top of it, and now it was the other way round.

  I hurried to the address that Frau Steinbeck had given me. Even on the stairs I could hear Trude’s voice. ‘No, no, not pink! You can’t wear a pink blouse with such a pale grey. It’s a pretty two-piece suit, a strong, sunny yellow would be just the thing!’ She was standing in her front hall saying goodbye to a neighbour. Before she could close her door I called, ‘Leave it open, Trude, it’s me!’ And then we were in each other’s arms. That really was a great, wonderful moment.

  There were huge expanses of parquet flooring in Trude’s new apartment, all polished to a shine. The familiar old pieces of furniture looked rather lost in these spacious rooms, as if a bird had left a few droppings around – here the desk, there a sofa. ‘And here,’ she announced, after we had seen round the front of this grand apartment, ‘are my children’s rooms.’

  When I saw her again, a little later, she was already saying, ‘I must have been out of my mind. I’ve been toiling like a slave, keeping those floors polished. What are we to do with a great big riding stable like that? We need light, air and sunshine.’ The Neukes soon moved house again, and they went on moving at frequent intervals to the end of their days.

  My best friend Irene Scherhey and her mother had also survived, and were still living in Prenzlauer Allee. After our first joy at our reunion, however, Irene was something of a disappointment: we couldn’t establish the old, close connection between us again.

  Irene had always been hyper-nervous. She talked very fast, kept interrupting herself, and wouldn’t let anyone else get a word in edgeways. After the end of the war she had worked for a few weeks as an assistant teacher. Then she got a job with the Americans, and soon became attached to a GI. From then on she would speak only American English so as to practise the language, which infuriated me. ‘Can’t we talk in German?’ I asked her several times. After all these years, there was so much that I’d have liked to discuss with her. But she only smiled and replied in English. Irene was crazy about all things American, and her heart was set on emigrating.

  Soon after the end of the war, a delegation from Hannchen Koch’s laundry went to see her to make her an offer. The managing director of the laundry, a man called Birkholz, had been a Nazi and was to be dismissed. Frau Koch was known to be a campaigning anti-Fascist and a reliable member of the laundry staff, and the delegation had picked her as his successor.

  I was sitting in the next room when the endless discussion took place, and I couldn’t help hearing it all. Hannchen Koch didn’t want to accept. ‘I want some peace at last, I want to recover and be a housewife,’ she kept saying. When the delegation had gone, I tackled her on the subject. ‘Hannchen, I think you’re taking the wrong path.’ And I added, as a joke, ‘You may yet be Minister of Laundries.’ Then she broke down in floods of tears, and this time they were genuine. ‘I don’t want all that any more, I don’t want a job or a career. I want to bottle fruit and have a good sleep,’ she sobbed. ‘I want to get my strength back, and I want to do some nice needlework in bright colours.’ At that moment I felt so sorry for her that I was really moved.

  The managing director of the laundry had been one of my father’s clients, and he was not an anti-Semite. He had worn the Party badge only because his career meant he had to. It was he who had provided the hundred marks of travel money that I had kept in my shoe on the way to Bulgaria, the money that had made it possible for me to return to Berlin. Later, through Hannchen Koch, he asked me to certify in writing that he had helped me. I made out a testimonial for a W. Birkholz, and Hannchen added his address.

  Later on I heard from Trude Neuke, who was now living in a little terraced house in Britz. ‘Who’d have thought it? There’s a fellow who was once a really dangerous SS man called Birkholz living just round the corner from here. A Jewish woman actually gave him a testimonial saying that he had helped her in the war. And the bastard was denazified.’ That man was also called W. Birkholz, but he had a different first name; he was Werner instead of Walter, or the other way around. And he had come by his denazification dishonestly, through his brother or cousin – in fact, the man who really had once helped me.

  I once went back to the building where I had lived for almost two years. The Czech greengrocers who had been our neighbours were still lodging in the first-floor apartment, which had suffered least from the bomb dropped in the air raid. Frau Knížek told me that Kurt Blase and Alexander Grass had died fighting with the Volkssturm territorials at the very end of the war, and that Frau Grass had suffered a stroke and was now in a care home in Mariendorf.

  I was particularly upset by the news of Alexander Grass’s death. He had done so much for me! And at last the hard shell that I had grown round my feelings broke apart. In a terrible kind of simplification, I had had only friends or enemies over the last few years. The great danger, and thus the general criterion by which I judged, had been the Gestapo. I hadn’t minded who died or lived in the war. At last I understood how much undeserved suffering the war had brought to non-Jews and Jews alike.

  It was Emil Koch who finally put an end to my diff
icult situation in Kaulsdorf. He had made friends with a couple of physicists, husband and wife, who lived in a rather better residential district on the Müggelsee, Berlin’s largest lake. He had probably been going round there offering his services as a handyman or a gardener; he went all over the place looking for work at this time. Anyway, he discussed the awkward state of affairs in his little wooden house with this couple.

  From now on his constant refrain was ‘The physicists said’ this, that or the other. The physicists had also looked at Adolf Guthmann’s allegedly bombed-out house, which heartily amused them. They and Emil made a plan together: first Vadder must have his house put in order, and then Vadder needed a new wife. Emil already had his eye on someone.

  There were some Romanian refugees camping unofficially on the attractive meadow outside our door. He had been looking for a woman among them who was the right age for his father-in-law. She was to cook for him, live with him and share his pension. From a distance, he showed me the woman recommended to him. She wore long, colourful, full skirts that looked like part of a national costume. He introduced her to his father-in-law and the two of them lived together for the rest of their lives.

  Emil also knew about my promise to his wife. With the help of the physicists, he devised a way to get me out of it. One evening, when I was standing in the kitchen doorway, he began giving me directions from where he was in the garden. ‘We’re going to do something amusing. You go a little way to the right and then walk forward.’ After that he took a run up, lifted me from the ground and whirled me round in a circle. ‘And now I’m throwing you out,’ he said, laughing.

  Then we went for a little walk together. ‘That was only a joke, of course,’ he explained. ‘But I’m the head of this household, and if I throw you out I’m the higher authority and you don’t have to keep your promise. Of course you can take all the time in the world over leaving.’ I was secretly jubilant. ‘I’ll go off tomorrow and look for a place of my own,’ I told him, although he was sceptical about my chances.