Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  At the same time she went along with my wish for her to give an interview to the Berlin historian Raymond Wolff, who was working on the history of the Neukölln doctor Benno Heller, and then to answer his questions at length. However, as she had emphasised to me, she didn’t want to tell him all she knew about Heller, even though it was her opinion that ‘all omissions do considerable damage to the truth’. Again, she does not identify herself in that interview, but calls herself ‘Frau Eissler’. In the case of a woman who had given her shelter when she was on the run, she was also anxious not to identify her by her real name, or to tell Wolff what it was; he did not learn from her that ‘Frau Rademann’ was really a woman called Gerda Janicke, who plays a not inconsiderable part in my mother’s memories.†

  In June 1993 she also said she was prepared to give a lecture at a conference in Eisenstadt, at the invitation of the University of Vienna, on the subject of ‘The U-Boats – Individual cases of resistance’ (U-Boats being a name that those who had gone underground in the Nazi period gave themselves). Significantly, this lecture was not published because – and I am sure of this – my mother didn’t want it to appear in print. She had given away a good deal of herself in it, probably more than she had intended. This was the first and last time that she spoke in public on the subject.

  In the lecture she confined herself to ‘Survival in Berlin’, adding, for the benefit of her audience: ‘This has … the advantage of my being able to draw on my own experience, and where I quote others I can also criticise the sources from an insider’s point of view.’

  She devoted a good deal of space in her lecture to Dr Benno Heller and his wife Irmgard, and will have been directly influenced by the interview mentioned above, which she had given only a little while earlier.

  I would not admit, being a historian myself, that I couldn’t get my own mother to talk about her life, and so on 26 December 1997, without any warning, I put a tape recorder on the table in my parents’ apartment and said, ‘You’ve always been meaning to tell your story – go ahead.’

  Rather taken aback, but also excitedly, my mother began recording her memories up to May 1945 on seventy-seven tapes in chronological order. The recordings followed strict rules; they were continuous, and I did not interrupt her narrative with questions. The clarity of structure was remarkable. My mother could pick up the thread of her story precisely, going on from the end of a previous session that had lasted sixty or often even ninety minutes. In parallel, I did my own research to check her facts. I always told her about it, especially when I came upon several people of the same name, and sorting them out was difficult. She found this extremely interesting, and was particularly glad when my research confirmed what she herself had said.

  Our sessions, although interrupted again and again by time that she spent in hospital, went on until 4 September. Some of the recordings were even done in hospital; the last was only a few days before her death. Marie Simon died on 16 September 1998.

  It is particularly obvious in the last recordings that her powers were waning, and one can sense the effort it cost her to dictate her memories.

  Next the tapes had to be typed out, and then the transcript – some 900 pages – lay fallow for some time, because the copy had to be compared with the sound recordings, and I could not face that directly after my mother’s death.

  The writer and journalist Irene Stratenwerth, with whom I have worked for many years on various projects for exhibitions, finally, and with sensitive feeling for the original, turned the long transcript into a self-contained text, the manuscript of this book by Marie Jalowicz Simon. I can hear my mother’s voice in every line of the present work.

  Preparing the manuscript entailed not only identifying the most important of the astonishing wealth of details and characters that my mother had remembered, and finding the narrative thread that was always present in my mother’s mind, however far she sometimes deviated from it. The events that she described also had to be exactly reconstructed. Now and then, for instance, she either did not know a precise date or had forgotten it.

  The places, names and characters that featured in her memories were to be found in old address books, or the files of a number of different authorities. Many people helped to search various archives. Often it was only through this work of reconstruction that we understood ‘the whole story’ she was telling – and at the same time we kept acknowledging, in retrospect, that Marie Simon was right, and really had said all that was necessary on a given subject.

  In the fifteen years since her death my own researches into hundreds of names, addresses and lives have shown that my mother remembered almost every detail correctly. I concluded my research work just before writing this afterword; only a part of what I found is included in the index of names. Describing the course of my research would make a book in itself, including, for instance, the account of how I found the descendants of Hans Goll, who helped my mother in Bulgaria, and those of ‘the Dutchman’.

  I would have liked to know more, and in more detail, about the time immediately after the liberation, and also about my mother’s life in the 1950s, but she was not prepared to talk about those periods. That time in her life was not so easily recalled as the preceding years, and by the time she reached it in her account, her strength was failing her.

  I still wonder why she left it so late to put it all on record. ‘If I tell you something,’ she said once as she was dictating her story on tape, ‘then it has to be the truth, and there’s a lot that one can’t talk about until half a century later.’ Her dictation did indeed sound as if it were a story that she was reading aloud, and a session often lasted as long as a lecture.

  In the course of dictating her memories, and in contrast to the lecture at Eisenstadt mentioned above, my mother deliberately avoided using books already published as sources, and comparing her memoirs with those of other people, either printed or from archives. On that subject, she said, ‘I didn’t really want to draw on any sources other than my own memory, because if I had, they would have modified what I remembered … What is entirely subjective, if it is honestly presented, is of greater objective value than alleged objectivity that misses its mark. In other words, to use an image: a frog should describe its experiences from the froggy point of view. For all the limited nature of the depiction, for all the colouring of the picture presented, it is then of objective value as the object of its subjectivity. The frog ought not to act as if it could fly and see things from an eagle’s point of view.’

  However, she had thought of putting her memories down on paper even during the time when she was in hiding; she kept a diary in her head without paper or pen, and edited the entries again and again to make all her experiences after 22 June 1942 shorter and more precise.

  It was on that date, 22 June, a Monday, that my mother escaped being arrested by the Gestapo, and from then on she was living ‘illegally’. I give the word in inverted commas on purpose, because she repeatedly told me that she regarded the idea of illegality as extremely questionable, ‘because the technology of the worst mass murder in the history of mankind was illegal; we must surely grant everyone the right to life. The Nazis were illegal, not me.’

  It is interesting that the term had to be used at times by those who had gone underground themselves, for instance by a friend of my mother’s, Fritz Goldberg, after his arrest.* She herself used it when, at the beginning of October 1945, in a CV accompanying her application for recognition as a victim of Fascism, she wrote, still under her maiden name, ‘I eluded arrest. I was not among those whose well-filled wallets allowed them to prepare well for a life of illegality.’*

  This ‘illegality’ was to last almost three years; my mother’s ‘normal’ life did not begin again until she left Kaulsdorf Süd at the end of August 1945, barefoot and with her few possessions on a handcart, to walk by way of Lichtenburg and Weissensee to Berlin, finally reaching Pankow, where she moved into her own apartment at No 7 Binzstrasse. On this long walk of almost
twenty kilometres, she had made many resolutions for the future; it was a long list.

  She was never going to marry a man who wasn’t Jewish. She would rather be on her own than with a partner who had no higher education. It was important to her to be honest, as her parents and other forebears had been honest. She resolved not ‘to be on familiar terms with any Tom, Dick or Harry, as you usually were in bars’, and ‘never … to be rude about the Germans again without differentiating between them’, for after all she had come upon many helpful non-Jewish people.

  After her school friend Heinrich Simon heard that his friend Marie had survived (they had taken their school-leaving certificates together at the Upper School of the Jewish Community of Berlin in 1939) he came to see her at the end of January 1946. He had emigrated to Palestine, and was later to be my father, but at this time he was a British soldier, and paying such a visit was almost impossible, but my mother fixed that too.

  She wrote British HQ a deliberately naïve letter, along the lines of, ‘Dear Headquarters, please, please let my fiancé come and see me.’ She had worked it out, correctly, that a letter had to stand out to be noticed at all, because applications of all kinds came into that office every day. No doubt her letter was passed round the entire British office staff, amidst laughter, and met with a positive response.

  Later on, when I asked my father after my mother’s death whether they were both serious about being engaged, and whether she had really envisaged a life with him at that point, he couldn’t say. ‘At first it was just role-playing on both sides.’

  On 29 January 1946, when she was not yet twenty-four years old, my mother had already written to a mutual friend of hers and my father’s, Ahron Fritz Kleinberger (b. Berlin 1920; d. Jerusalem 2005), later to be a professor of education, explaining at length her reasons for wanting to stay in Berlin. First the young woman drew up a balance sheet: ‘I’m alive, I am sound in mind and body, I am beginning my university studies and am happy with life (apart from some inhibitions deriving from the presence of my conscience).’ On her decision to stay she wrote,

  Please don’t be surprised if I tell you that I feel I’ve emigrated already. I have emigrated from Hitler’s Germany to the Germany of Goethe and Johann Sebastian Bach, and I feel very comfortable there. In other words, I’m minded to stay. My reasons are as follows:

  1) I was born and grew up here, so logically this is my home (perhaps I should add ‘unfortunately’, but there’s no altering the facts).

  2) I’m a little battle-weary, and I fear that if I have to come to terms with entirely new circumstances and all their difficulties, I won’t get on with my studies or find the peace I need so much.

  3) I can live here without having to make demands on anyone. The idea of facing a void as a refugee or beggar is more than I can bear, after all the years of pointless, mindless wandering in terrible living conditions that are now, I’m glad to say, behind me.

  And at this point I mustn’t forget … to say that I am enjoying many privileges here that make it possible for me to live more comfortably …

  4) I’d like to defuse the usual argument that pride doesn’t allow us to live in the land of the gas chambers. Do you think that the mob anywhere else in the world, if their worst instincts had been cleverly aroused, would have behaved any worse than the mob in Germany? Germans have murdered millions of Jews. But many Germans, risking their lives, made great sacrifices to help me.

  […]

  Do you remember how you once brought razor-sharp arguments to bear on my Zionist enthusiasm? Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis …*

  If one doesn’t want to perish, the only solution is probably to adapt to circumstances as they are.

  I don’t want my reasons for staying here to be taken as propaganda for Jews to come back to Germany. And I’m certainly not trying to influence you in that way, in fact I think the chances of my success would be low. All these thoughts of mine were purely egocentric. I don’t believe in any final answer to the Jewish question, only individual answers. So I’d say the best thing is for us all to stay where we feel most comfortable.

  […]

  I have the courage to be what I am: a German Jewish woman, and on my own if need be.

  Of course you won’t feel homesick for the accursed country of Germany – how could you? But if you ever, purely in the line of business, come here, even with contempt in your heart, don’t forget to visit me. I like to get visitors from Abu Telfan on the moon,* and will be waiting patiently for all my friends. Here I have an illusion that might melt away in the heat of Palestine: may God gather us in from all four corners of the world …

  So my mother stayed in that ‘accursed country of Germany’, more precisely in Berlin, and even more precisely in Pankow, moving only once, in 1952, into a larger apartment at 59 Wolfshagener Strasse.

  My parents lived there for the following decades, and it was there that my late sister Bettina (1952–1989) and I (b. 1949) spent our childhood.

  On her twenty-fourth birthday, 4 April 1946, she officially enrolled at the University of Berlin to study philosophy and sociology. She had already been able to attend lectures. In the questionnaire that she filled in to register at the Jewish Community on 23 July 1945, she wrote under ‘Profession’: ‘Before 1933, schoolgirl; now, student.’

  ‘I have now matriculated at Berlin University,’ she wrote not without pride in a CV written for the Committee on Victims of Fascism, Department of Victims of the Nuremberg Laws, on 23 October 1945.† At the same time she was working at the G. Fritz translation and teaching bureau in Binzstrasse in Pankow. Because of that, she sometimes gave her profession as ‘working student’. At the time she was also trying to find out what had become of several friends and acquaintances who had helped her in the past, but fundamentally all she wanted was to look to the future.

  *

  She was not happy with the studies she had chosen; she tried this and that, for instance going to lectures on Slavonic studies. ‘I joined some Bulgarian course or other, and very soon left again, finding that I’d done it for purely emotional reasons. But Bulgaria was over, I’d left it behind me, and the language that had fascinated and interested me so much didn’t matter to me now. I listened to philosophical lectures and thought: you idiots, if you can’t say what’s chance and what’s fate you might as well take a running jump. I got nothing out of all that, I didn’t enjoy it, and sometimes I thought maybe there was no point in studying,’ said Marie Simon half a century later.

  On 2 November 1946 she wrote to my father saying that she went to lectures ‘only very occasionally. Neither the intellectual level nor the distinctly Nazi attitude of most of the students is what could be expected of a cultured person.’

  A few months earlier, on 5 July, she had said to him, on the same subject,

  You must understand that there’s too much behind me, I’m too mature and too aware of myself to attend university uncritically, like a good little schoolgirl, particularly knowing that this state of things will improve, and with my qualifications … I’ll be able to tackle the quota of work for two semesters in one. You know me, you know that discipline was never my strong point, and it won’t be difficult for you to guess what conclusions I drew: I’ve been going to lectures as industriously as I used to go to handicraft lessons back at school (i.e. not at all).

  Those days of persecution and deprivation had, of course, not left her unaffected; her body finally rebelled. She suffered a complete breakdown in the autumn of 1946 and was sick for two months. ‘It was a matter of life and death … I felt very clearly that it was up to me whether I came through or simply fell asleep.’ She wrote this to my father in November 1946. But at that time she was already past the worst, and getting a good deal better.

  It was not the first time she had collapsed; she had already said to him, in January 1946, ‘I got through my mental breakdown after the end of the war – it would have been unnatural if I had escaped one – and I recovered well.’
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  The return to normality was particularly difficult for her – she says that she could find no way of ‘really coming to the surface again’. She also suffered from the fact that friends and acquaintances emigrated. ‘Those terrible partings continue.’ After all, she had lived with partings for years, ‘in fact from 1933 onwards’.

  ‘Coming to the surface’ entailed the rejection of anything temporary and provisional. ‘Because if you’re living only for the time being you develop a chronic sense of discomfort, and it has to be counteracted.’ She described herself as ‘anti-provisional’, and asked my father in August 1946 to share her view of the world. At the time he was still in Palestine; after demobilisation he was employed by the Jerusalem post-office administration. My mother, who had been vehemently in favour of staying in Berlin in the letter to Fritz Kleinberger quoted above, changed her mind at the end of 1946. In view of the difficult economic situation, and the poverty and misery suffered by the population of Berlin, she now wanted, whatever happened, to join my father in Palestine, in Erez Israel.

  ‘I can no longer advise you, with a clear conscience, to come back to Germany,’ she wrote to him on 2 November 1946, giving as her reason the fact that ‘[r]eactionary forces have the upper hand, and are greatly favoured by the powers that are now pursuing colonial policies hand in hand with Germany, and whose political aims are free of any idealism because they pay homage to capital as the ultimate principle. We are mud, just as we used to be. Those who weren’t Nazis before have to turn Nazi now. What luck that I’m living in the Russian zone.’

  My father did not take her arguments seriously, since he could not imagine the conditions in Berlin. My mother, on the other hand, could not form any idea of the difficult conditions in which my father was living in Palestine. At least, he did not let himself be persuaded to change his mind, but left Palestine on 21 September 1947 to return to Berlin, where my parents married in March 1948. They had finally decided to make Berlin the centre of their lives.