Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  When we came back, he told Hannchen, ‘I’ve thrown Mariechen out, and now the two of us can have some peace and quiet again.’ His wife reacted surprisingly sensibly. All she said was, ‘That’s all right. Things have to go back to normal some time.’

  4

  The house where I had grown up was no longer standing; 19a Prenzlauer Strasse had been razed to the ground. So where was I to go? I knew that Pankow was one of the few parts of Berlin that were still largely intact. Not many bombs had fallen there. While the streets and pavements in other districts were still covered with rubble, you could walk round Pankow for a long time without even noticing that a war had been going on. Furthermore, it was the home of my only living relation, Uncle Karl.

  So I set out on the journey to Pankow next day. The housing office for that district occupied a single large room, where the clerks sat at several large tables. Among them, to my surprise, I saw Tati Kupke, my aunt Mia’s sister. She was considered an anti-Fascist who had proved her worth, and so although she had really been a manual worker in the past she was co-opted into this improvised office. We were both very glad to see each other again. At this moment, what had happened between her husband Willi and me when Tati gave me shelter for a few nights didn’t matter. It was three years ago; she didn’t mention it, and nor did I.

  ‘I’d like to move to Pankow,’ I told her. ‘There are no apartments in Berlin itself, and Uncle Karl at least lives here.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a rule that you can only claim residence where you used to live before,’ she told me. She fell silent for a moment. We were not alone in the room. Then she went on, ‘But of course that applies to you.’ And in a whisper she told me the name of the only street in Pankow that had been mainly destroyed, and the numbers of the buildings in it. I would have to give one of those addresses to get a permit to see apartments to let in Pankow. No one would be able to check whether I had ever really lived there.

  Then she went to find her boss and ask him to let me have the permit at once. I was from Pankow, she told him, I was Jewish, I had gone into hiding to survive the war, and had been bombed out.

  ‘I badly need peace and quiet,’ I added. ‘I don’t just want a room, I want an apartment of my own.’

  ‘Out of the question,’ said Tati’s boss. ‘You’re a nice girl, young lady, and you are certainly a victim of Fascism. But there are whole families who can’t get anything but emergency accommodation here – just a single room, furnished or unfurnished.’

  ‘Even if it’s only a stable or a shed, I want to be on my own,’ I repeated desperately. These words struck a chord of some kind in the man. ‘How sad,’ he murmured, and repeated several times, ‘A stable or a shed.’

  ‘Don’t you at least have something the matter with your lungs? Do you suffer from tuberculosis?’ he asked me.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I said regretfully.

  In the end it turned out that Tati couldn’t offer anyone an apartment anyway. But she gave me a number of permits to view accommodation that I could show to prospective landlords, and I set off with those.

  I went through all the addresses, and they were all useless. They included, for instance, a room with a wall badly damaged by a shell. It had a hole half a metre wide above the bed. The landlady was delighted when I turned up. ‘I sleep on the other side of this hole,’ she said, ‘so now we can say good morning and good night every day. I get very lonely, you see.’ Then she hurried round to the other side of the hole in the wall and called, ‘Cuckoo!’ through it. She obviously didn’t have all her marbles.

  ‘No, that won’t do,’ I said firmly. ‘I need a room with its walls intact.’ To get out of this difficulty I said untruthfully, ‘My boyfriend would be practising the trumpet here.’ I had trouble shaking the woman off, and had to be impolite to get away from her.

  By the end of that very hot day, I was exhausted. The sun was already low in the sky, and I had only one viewing permit left, for a room in Binzstrasse. I went there and rang the bell, but no one came to the door. Through a ground-floor window, however, I could see a man sitting down and shaving himself. Later I found out that his name was Levy. He was a Catholic, but he had Jewish forebears.

  ‘You can ring until Easter and Whitsun fall on the same day, she’s stone deaf,’ he told me. ‘What do you want with the old lady?’ I showed him the viewing permit and told my story.

  ‘Maybe you’d better ask Rühle the architect. He has his office right opposite, and the whole corner building belongs to him,’ said Herr Levy. ‘Rühle was always against the Nazis, and he’s helped a lot of people. Perhaps he’ll have something for you.’

  I went to the architect’s office and met him right away: an elderly gentleman with a fine-featured, clever, kindly face. Briefly, I explained myself. ‘What luck that it’s not too late to help you out,’ he said, for he had an idea. He told me that one of his single-room apartments was rented by an old lady who had spent the whole war out in the country. She had come to Pankow only once a year to make sure that the building was still standing. ‘Since she’s made herself at home in her village for so long,’ Rühle decided, ‘she might as well stay there, and you can move into the apartment. I’ll make sure it’s all right with the housing office.’

  Then he climbed to the top floor of the building with me to show me the little corner apartment. It consisted of a bedroom that was all peculiar angles, and a kitchen that could also be used as a living room. I was delighted.

  ‘When could I move in?’ I asked. He handed me the key and said, ‘Right away. We’ll draw up the agreement later. For now, let me wish you peace and happiness here.’ I clutched the key, wondering if I was awake or dreaming.

  Back in his office, he asked me to tell him a little about the time I had spent in Berlin since going underground. I was happy to do that, because it was a relief to me to talk about it. In return, he told me this and that about his own life, and something odd happened: he several times used the subjunctive mood in indirect speech. It was three years since I had heard that grammatical feature of educated High German, and I had to turn away to hide my emotion. I was moved to tears to meet with the kind of language that was familiar to me from my parental home and my schooldays.

  Then it was high time for me to set off back to Kaulsdorf. On the way I held the bunch of keys firmly in my hand, looking at it again and again as if it were a precious jewel.

  The Kochs welcomed me warmly. ‘Back so late?’ I had only just managed to return before curfew.* At first Emil could hardly believe that I had actually been successful. I had an apartment of my own, and I could move in at once.

  I moved out of the Kochs’ house next day. This time I had to go all the way from Kaulsdorf on foot, since I had a handcart to push. I had found a pair of sandals, but they were uncomfortable because they didn’t fit properly, so I decided to walk barefoot to the former capital city of the German Reich.

  ‘I’m going to equip you as if you were my own child,’ announced Frau Koch, packing a quilt, pillows, bed-linen, cutlery, a whisk and other household items into the handcart. As she did so, she kept enumerating all the things of which she was depriving herself so that she could give them to me. I felt annoyance secretly rising in me: in spite of all this fuss, after all, she was giving me only a tiny fraction of what had once been my parents’ household goods.

  Two silver teaspoons also went into the cart. ‘We’ve always been poor,’ Frau Koch told me, ‘we had only these two solid silver spoons. I’ve treasured them since my childhood, and now I’m giving them to you as your dowry.’ That was total nonsense: the initial of our family’s surname was unmistakably engraved on those spoons!

  The full extent of her delusions was clear yet again at that moment. For years she had tormented me by announcing again and again, in a solemn voice, ‘We are one and the same being, because we bear the same name and our birthdays are on the same day. Your soul belongs to me.’ On the one hand she had lent me her identity, and on the o
ther she had identified completely with my family; in her mind she was not Johanna Elisabeth Koch, née Guthmann, but a Jalowicz and therefore Jewish. However, I had never before heard anything so remote from reality as the nonsense she was talking now, at the moment of farewell. And at last it was quite obvious: this had to be the end of our association.

  ‘I’ll bring you back the handcart at the weekend,’ I said, trying to sound affectionate and naïve. ‘And of course you’ll always be like foster parents to me. I’ll come and see you every Sunday.’

  ‘Never mind all that. I know what life is like,’ said Emil, grinning. ‘You’ll come two or three Sundays running, then once a month, then once every six months and after that never again.’

  I had planned to do three things on the long walk ahead of me. The first was to think of how, all those years ago, my parents had been given those silver spoons as a wedding present by Aunt Hulda, my grandmother’s sister.

  Second, I had decided that I would spit. I had been obliged to spend the last three years in places where many people spat in the street, and finally I had adopted that disgusting habit myself. Society had spat me out, so I spat back, but always with the proviso that I would stop it if I survived the war.

  I was going to spit for the last time on the border between Kaulsdorf-Süd and Biesdorf-Süd. Only I didn’t know exactly where that was. So I spoke to a man who was weeding his garden: could he tell me just where Kaulsdorf ended and Biesdorf began?

  ‘What do you want to know for?’ he asked suspiciously.

  At that moment I said to myself: stop! I don’t need to run away now, I don’t need to duck, I have genuine papers in my bag, no one can do anything to me. A civil human being answers a question instead of responding with another question.

  ‘Do you know or don’t you?’ I asked the man brusquely. He admitted that he didn’t know for certain. After I had gone a little further, someone else was able to tell me that yes, I was right on the border. So I gathered all my saliva in my mouth and spat lavishly on the road. After that I felt better. I was out of what the people here called ‘our colony’ at last.

  Point number three on my programme was that I would make a mental list of everything I wasn’t going to do any more. I wasn’t going to spit, because that was uncivilised. I was never going to sit in a wicker chair again. I was never going to marry a man who wasn’t Jewish. I’d rather be on my own than with a partner who didn’t have any higher education. I would be honest, as my parents and my other forebears had always been honest. I wasn’t going to be on familiar terms with any Tom, Dick or Harry, as you usually were in bars. I was never going to be rude about the Germans again without differentiating between them. I was never going to be unjust and ungrateful to people like the Kochs, who had helped me. And so on. My list was a long one.

  Between Lichtenberg and Weissensee I noticed a young woman ahead of me, looking very elated as she walked along. She was wearing a pale blue dress, and holding a huge enamel basin on top of her head. As I found out later, it contained a tiny piece of margarine that she had acquired somewhere.

  When the girl turned round I recognised Ursel Ehrlich, a friend of Irene Scherhey’s. She too had gone underground during the Nazi period and had survived. We greeted each other warmly, stopped to rest for a while and told each other how we had managed.

  Ursel had found a source of spare pieces of leather somewhere, had used them to make bookmarks and other small items, and then went round selling them – in garden cafés in summer, in bars in winter. ‘My best customers were in Altermann’s bar,’ she told me.

  ‘Altermann in Mühlenstrasse! To think we never met there!’ I said in surprise. Then I admired her dress. ‘You’re so elegant!’

  ‘You have to do what you can,’ she said. She had dyed a sheet blue, made herself a dress out of it, and applied the pattern at the hem by a batik method. It suited her very well.

  She looked at my feet. ‘You can go about barefoot in the country, but there’s rubbish and splinters of glass everywhere in the city. Don’t you have any shoes?’ she asked.

  ‘I do have a pair of sandals, but they don’t fit, so I can’t really walk in them.’

  Of course we were speaking in Berlin dialect. I had learned to love it in the last three years: it was the language of helpful people. Correct High German, on the other hand, had not proved its worth; it was the cultured and educated upper middle class that had failed the test.

  About an hour and a half later I opened the door to my apartment in Pankow. I had laboriously dragged the handcart containing all my household goods up to the third floor. I couldn’t risk leaving anything out in the street; it would have been stolen at once.

  My feet were hot and sore. I put two chairs side by side in front of the sink so that I could sit there comfortably. There was no gas or electricity on, but there was running water. ‘Hello, dear water-tap,’ I said cheerfully, but much moved at the same time. ‘I’m all alone here, but I’m not really alone. I have you. And I have the great good luck that no landlord or landlady, no one else at all can disapprove of me sitting comfortably here on two chairs, running cold water over my feet.’

  And that was what I did.

  Afterwards I lay down on the floor, stretched out full length, and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

  * The actual place name of the area in which Number 13 Nitzwalder Strasse lies is Kaulsdorf Süd. Wuhlheide is a meadow and the nearest S-Bahn station.

  * Later the Karl-Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik.

  † Only when Marie Simon dictated these memoirs in 1998 did she find out that she had been wrong in thinking the Kochs had Aryanised her parents’ property. Hermann and Marie Jalowicz had sold their summertime house to the Kochs in September 1938 for 6,400 Reichsmarks. The larger part of the purchase price was to pay off debts that Hermann and Betti Jalowicz owed to various relations of theirs. The sum corresponded to about the market value of the property at the time. Hermann Jalowicz received 500 Reichsmarks in cash for furnishings and household goods. In February 1940 the Kochs, probably with the help of Hermann Jalowicz, drew up a will naming Marie Jalowicz as their heir if they died without having children of their own. Marie Simon was surprised to inherit this legacy when Johanna Koch died in 1994.

  * The land at Number 90 Kaulsdorfer Strasse belonged to Felix Walter, a Jew from Erkner. At first the ‘administration’ of it went to the German Reich, which then confiscated it. The camp erected on that land served first as a transit camp for German settlers from Volhynia, then as a camp for French prisoners of war. After 1942, over 1,000 prisoners of war and forced labourers, including many women and children, were accommodated here and had to work for German Railways. In the winter of 1943–1944, the camp was destroyed in an air raid, but then partly rebuilt. After the end of the war it served as a point of assembly for prisoners, forced labourers and foreign workers of various nationalities before they were repatriated. Today there is an exhibition by the Marzahn-Hellendorf Museum on the spot, recording the history of the camp.

  * The Soviet armed forces arrived in Kaulsdorf/Mahlsdorf on 22 April 1945. The forced labour camp at 90 Kaulsdorfer Strasse was liberated by Soviet soldiers on 23 April.

  * After 1943 the German Reichsmark was worthless on the international foreign exchange market, and could not be converted to any other currency.

  * The questionnaire that Marie Jalowicz filled in there when registering herself on 23 July 1945 is preserved in the archives of the New Synagogue Berlin Foundation – Centrum Judaicum.

  * The curfew introduced on 14 August 1945 by Allied Command ran from 2300 to 0500 hours.

  Afterword

  ‘Do you seriously think I would not be intellectually capable of writing down the story of my life if I wanted to?’

  My mother, then aged about seventy, shouted this question down the phone in a stentorian voice, as if she were standing in front of her students in the lecture room.

  At the other end of the line, the recipient of her forcefully
phrased inquiry was a journalist who wanted to publish interviews with survivors of the Nazi period. ‘That’s the last thing I want,’ added my mother, turning to me – I happened to be visiting my parents, and was thus by chance a witness of this phone call.

  Much as I understood her, I thought it a great shame that her story might never be written. I was more or less familiar with it, but I was far from knowing all the details.

  Before 1997, my mother had never really told the dramatic history of her survival. Now and then she had mentioned something in the family circle, but never as a consecutive narrative, and always out of the blue. You could hardly ever tell what set such reminiscences off.

  One of my childhood memories is of a family friend who repeatedly tried to persuade her to write or, better still, dictate her story. ‘Yes, yes,’ my mother would tell her, only to add at once that this, that or the other was more important and must be dealt with first.

  Once – I was still at elementary school – my class teacher asked my mother to talk to my fellow pupils about her life in the years just after 1933. She agreed to that request. The lesson set aside for the talk passed quickly, and she still hadn’t really said much, apart from describing relatively minor incidents in the years when she had been in hiding, although she certainly made them sound exciting.

  As she grew older, however, she became increasingly willing to talk about the details of her life. For instance, I managed to persuade her to tell the historian Carola Sachse about her experiences doing forced labour for Siemens, and she gave her an interview, under the pseudonym of ‘Gerda B.’, on 22 April 1993. She was very anxious that her real name should not appear in Sachse’s book.*