The Berlin Boxing Club

by Robert Sharenow

  The Berlin

  Boxing Club

  Robert Sharenow

  For Stacey,

  who is always in my corner.

  “There is one kind of sport which should be especially encouraged, although many people . . . consider it brutal and vulgar, and that is boxing. . . . There is no other sport which equals this in developing the militant spirit, none that demands such a power of rapid decision or which gives the body the flexibility of good steel. . . . But, above all, a healthy youth has to learn to endure hard knocks.”

  —Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PART I

  How I Became Jewish

  First Round Knockout

  Winzig und Spatz

  Galerie Stern

  Der Meister

  The Barter

  Boxing Lesson No. 1

  Uncle Jakob

  Drawing In on Max

  Greta

  Principal Munter

  The Return of Piss Boy

  Barely Floating

  The Countess

  PART II

  The Berlin Boxing Club

  Pandora’s Box

  Learning to Stand, Breathe, and Eat

  Neblig and Joe Palooka

  A Prayer

  Uniform Shirts and Rotten Apples

  The Secret History of Jewish Boxers

  Stern vs. Strasser

  Concentration

  A Real Fighter

  Early Dismissal

  Bertram Heigel

  The Brown Bomber

  Sour Sixteen

  The Reopening of Galerie Stern

  Word from Dachau

  Seeing Red

  The Fight

  The Real Max

  Good-bye, Winzig

  The 1937 Youth Boxing Championship

  Ice Cream

  PART III

  The Last Picasso

  The Mongrel

  Return to the Berlin Boxing Club

  The Rematch

  Broken Glass

  Drop Cloth

  An Evening Stroll with Our Aunt

  The Feint

  The Excelsior

  Healthy Instincts

  The Amerika

  Author’s Note

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Robert Sharenow

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  1934–1935

  “The first and hardest lesson for young boxers is learning how to take a punch. If you cannot master this skill you will never have success in the ring. Even the greatest champions must absorb countless blows.”

  Helmut Müller, Boxing Basics for German Boys

  How I Became Jewish

  AS HERR BOCH FINISHED THE LAST LECTURE OF THE school year, I sketched one final caricature of him into the margins of my notebook. He had bushy gray hair, and long muttonchop sideburns framed his jowly face. I enjoyed drawing his exaggerated features, and it helped me endure even his most tedious classes. One day I drew him as the kaiser, the next as Napoleon. Today, though, I simply depicted him as an enormous walrus, which was the animal he most closely resembled. He was one of our school’s more kindly instructors, known as much for his love of tales of Teutonic knights as for the copious piles of dandruff that collected on his jacket. So sometimes I felt bad about my cruel creations, although not bad enough not to do it. I was just completing the drawing when the bell rang, ending the class and the term.

  “Please remember to leave your final essay books,” Herr Boch said, closing the book he had been reading from. “And enjoy your summer.”

  “Danke, Herr Boch,” most of the boys replied as we rose, moved to the front of the room, and dropped our essay books onto a pile on his desk.

  I shoved the rest of my books into my rucksack and quickly turned to join the flow of boys exiting the room, anxious for vacation to begin.

  “Stern,” I heard Herr Boch call to me.

  I froze and turned toward him.

  “Ja, Herr Boch?” I said.

  “Stay back a moment.”

  I slowly moved to the front of the room, a lump forming in my throat. Had he finally caught me? I stopped in front of his desk.

  “I’d like you to help alphabetize the essay books for me.”

  “Of course,” I said, exhaling with relief.

  When I finally walked out of the classroom, all of my friends had gone and the hall was eerily quiet and empty. A door creaked in the distance. Probably just the old building groaning in the wind, I thought, but some instinct sent a chill through my body, and the small hairs pricked the back of my neck.

  I moved to the back stairwell and picked up the faint sound of whistling. As I descended the stairs, the whistling grew louder until I could discern the guttural melody of the “Horst Wessel Song,” the unofficial anthem of the Nazis. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve sworn it sounded like a group of nature scouts on a hike in the Bavarian Alps. Then I heard the slap of leather soles hitting the floor in time to the music, like an approaching squadron of soldiers.

  Suddenly I knew exactly who it was. And I knew they were after me.

  My brain screamed at me to run, but something, fear probably, kept my legs from accelerating. I slowed down until I was nearly tiptoeing down the steps, hoping against hope that I could sneak by them. Yet as I got to the second floor, the door to the hallway opened, and the group of boys poured out onto the landing.

  There were three of them, all a year older than I was: Gertz Diener, Julius Austerlitz, and Franz Hellendorf. I quickly averted my gaze, looking down at my feet, as I tried to continue my descent to the first floor. But before I could take another step, the whistling stopped, and they abruptly blocked my path. Short, wide, and angry, Gertz had a shock of spiky blond hair and spoke with the slightest lisp. Julius stood a foot taller than Gertz and had an extremely thick torso, as if he were wearing a small barrel under his shirt. And Franz was skinny and dark, like a junior version of Josef Goebbels. In the past when they had walked down the hall together, I had thought they looked funny, with their distinctly small, medium, and large outlines. But at this moment there was nothing comical about them as they fanned themselves around me like a tight human fence.

  They called themselves the Wolf Pack; really, though, they were a makeshift National Socialist club, and they had been terrorizing the handful of Jewish students at our school over the past several months. Each of the four other Jewish students at my school, the Holstein Gymnasium, had received at least one violent hazing from the Wolf Pack, except me. Up until that moment I had managed to avoid them, assuming that I had kept my background hidden.

  “Guten Tag, Stern,” Gertz said, mock-politely.

  “Guten Tag,” I managed to stammer.

  “We know your little secret,” he said.

  “What secret?”

  “Oh, you know. You should have been honest with us, Stern.”

  “After all, we might’ve wanted to borrow money from you, Jew,” Franz added.

  I stiffened with fear. I didn’t really consider myself Jewish. Raised by an atheist father and an agnostic mother, I grew up in a secular household. I had absolutely no religious background or education. I also had been blessed with a religiously neutral name, Karl Stern. “Karl” had no Jewish connotation, and as for “Stern,” you could find Jewish Sterns, Lutheran Sterns, even some Catholic Sterns. And of all the members of my family, I was by far the least Jewish looking. Tall and skinny with fair skin, dirty blond hair, and a small, thin nose, I was told that I most closely resembled m
y only non-Jewish grandparent, my mother’s father, a tall blond Dutchman. How had they discovered my secret? Had they seen my father or my sister?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not Jewish,” I stammered.

  “Oh, no?” Gertz said. “Then what are you?”

  “I wasn’t raised with any religion.”

  “So you’re a Red,” Gertz sneered. “That’s even worse.”

  “All the Reds are Jews anyway, aren’t they?” Franz said.

  “Communist Schwein,” Julius said.

  “Jews are destroying our country.”

  “Dirty pig.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Pull down his pants!” Gertz barked.

  Before I could react, Julius grabbed my arms. I strained against his grasp, but he easily held me firm. Franz roughly unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my trousers. Three buttons snapped off in the process and clicked down the stairs that I wished I had run down earlier, descending with sharp little pings. All that school year I had managed to guard my nakedness from my classmates. Athletics were not stressed at our gymnasium, so we had physical education only once a week, and in the locker room I always managed to shield my incriminating penis behind a towel. But now Franz pulled down my pants and underwear so they hung around my ankles, and my penis bobbed in front of them in all of its circumcised glory. My father had explained that the procedure had been done for health reasons and that lots of modern people were circumcising their children in Europe and the United States. Whatever the reason, no matter how much the rest of me looked and felt like a gentile, I had a penis that was undeniably Jewish.

  “There it is, boys,” Gertz declared. “A one-hundred-percent authentic kosher wurst.”

  “But I’m not Jewish,” I quickly said. “I’ve never even been to synagogue.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Gertz said. “You have Jew blood.”

  “There’s only one thing worse than a Jew, and that’s a Jew who tries to pretend he’s not a Jew,” Fritz added.

  “Sneaky little shit,” Julius hissed. “Hitler was right about you.”

  I longed to confess that not only did I not consider myself Jewish, but I disliked Jews as much as they did. I didn’t identify with them at all, and I was furious at having to be associated with them. To me, most of the Nazi propaganda about Jews had a ring of truth to it. There were lots of Jews in banking and finance. Jews generally lived in their own neighborhoods, separate and apart from “real” Germans. My family didn’t live in a Jewish section of the city, and my father used to complain about religious Jews when passing through their neighborhoods. When he’d see them on the street, he’d mutter, “Here come the undertakers.” Once I heard him comment, “We finally live in modern times when we can throw off all of that primitive Scheiss and live like everyone else. Yet they still live in a ghetto.”

  Many of the religious Jews I had seen had large noses, thick red lips, and small dark eyes, and they wore black hats and coats. I found it more than slightly ironic that my father also possessed these basic physical characteristics, save for the black hat and coat.

  Jews sounded different. They acted different. They were different. And just like Adolf Hitler, I believed they were ruining everything. Only Hitler saw the Jews as ruining Germany, while I merely saw them as threatening my standing at school and with my friends. I stood in the stairwell wondering how the Wolf Pack had found out about my background.

  Franz lunged forward and spat directly in my face. A thick line of hot spittle ran down my right cheek until it dangled off the side of my face. Gertz cleared his throat and shot his own wad of phlegm onto my other cheek. They all laughed. My limbs felt numb, as if my body had suddenly turned liquid. And then the fear so overwhelmed me that I totally lost control. A small stream of urine trickled down the side of my leg and onto my pants, which were bunched at my feet. I felt the warm wetness on my legs.

  “Verdammt!” Gertz yelled. “He’s pissing himself.”

  Julius let go of my arms.

  “Get away from me, you Jew pig!”

  He kicked me from behind, sending me crashing to my knees and into the small puddle of piss I had made. The moisture seeped into the wool of my pants leg and crawled up the side of the fabric. As the three boys closed in around me, I looked up at them and muttered weakly: “But I’m not a Jew.”

  “Get up!” Gertz commanded. “Get up and fight!”

  First Round Knockout

  THE WORD “FIGHT” STUNG MY EARS ALMOST AS BADLY AS the word “Jew.” I had never been in a fight before, always avoiding any sort of conflict out of fear of getting hurt. I lay there silently, hoping that spitting in my face, pulling down my trousers, and watching me piss myself would be enough to satisfy them.

  “Pull up your pants and fight like a man,” Gertz commanded. “Schnell!”

  I struggled to my feet, pulling up my pants with as much dignity as I could muster. As I rebuckled the belt, moisture soaked my crotch, and I felt like a baby wearing a wet diaper.

  “Look, I don’t want to fight,” I stammered.

  “Of course you don’t,” Gertz sneered. “All Jews are cowards.”

  I resisted the urge to tell them that two of my uncles, my father’s older brothers, had been killed in World War I. Uncle Heinrich had even been posthumously awarded the Iron Cross.

  “Franz, you take this one,” Gertz commanded.

  Franz Hellendorf, the smallest of the group, inched forward, and in that moment I saw something familiar in his dark, moist eyes. Fear.

  He was scared too.

  A coward knows another coward when he sees one. Franz shot a look up and down my body and measured himself against me. I was at least six inches taller than he was. His eyes met mine, and he blinked nervously. I must have looked like a gangly giant to him.

  “Go on.” Julius pushed Franz toward me. “You can take him.”

  As Franz inched forward, I instinctively jerked back. Gertz and Julius laughed.

  “Look at that, he’s scared of little Franz,” Gertz said.

  Even Franz smiled a bit at my reaction, and I could see his fear receding; the black pool in his eye dried into something hard.

  “Put up your fists and fight,” he said.

  I tried to react, but I could not will my arms to move.

  Franz lurched forward and shot a fist at me that landed at the bottom of my rib cage. It was a light punch, but it still cut some of the wind out of my lungs. I coughed. The others laughed, so he punched me again, this time catching me on the edge of my chin and sending my head snapping back. More laughter. Franz then threw several punches at my face, landing on my eye and the side of my mouth. My top lip caught on the corner of my right canine tooth, and blood gushed out of my mouth and dribbled down my chin, eliciting more howls. The sight of my blood gave Franz an even bigger shot of confidence, and he danced around me like a prizefighter, taunting me to defend myself.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  Suddenly I heard the voice of Herr Boch from the stairwell above us.

  “Hallo? What’s going on down there?”

  The stairwell’s twists and turns prevented him from seeing us. Gertz, Julius, and Franz shot one another quick looks of panic. My labored breath was the only sound in the stairwell.

  “Hallo?” Herr Boch called again as he began to descend the stairs. Unfortunately he was one of the oldest teachers at our gymnasium and couldn’t move very quickly.

  Gertz grabbed me by the shirt and hissed into my ear: “You fell down the stairs. Understand?”

  Before I could reply, he pushed, and I fell hard against the side of the stairwell, knocking my face against the metal handrail as I went down. I slid down a few steps until I came to a stop face-first on the landing. My mouth filled with blood as one of my lower teeth came loose and dangled against my tongue. The fall hurt more than all of Franz’s punches combined.

  The Wolf Pack sprinted past me down the stairs and disappeared out the door
before my teacher came into view.

  “Stern!” he cried when he saw me. “Are you okay?”

  He rushed to my side.

  “Du lieber Gott!” he said. “My God! What happened?”

  He gave me his hand and helped hoist me back to my feet. It was then that he noticed the stain on my trousers, and his nose twitched at the stench of me. My whole face throbbed as if tiny bicycle pumps were inflating thin balloons under my skin and against the bones in my head. The dangling tooth fell out, but I tucked it under my tongue, not wanting Herr Boch to see.

  “What happened?” he asked again.

  I knew he was fond of me, as I was a top history student. I wanted to confess, but while Herr Boch never spoke about politics, I was afraid that if he found out I had Jewish blood, he would turn against me and give me poor marks.

  “I fell down the stairs,” I managed to say through my swollen mouth.

  “Stern, I heard other boys with you. Who was with you?”

  “I fell down the stairs,” I repeated. “Danke, Herr Boch. I’m fine.”

  I quickly retreated down the stairs before he could continue his questioning. As I pushed my way through the doors into the first-floor hallway, I half expected to see Gertz and the Wolf Pack waiting for me. But the hallway was mercifully empty. My body reacted with a shudder of relief. A sob escaped my mouth from deep within me. I longed to cry, to let it all out, but I swallowed that urge and buried it back in my gut. I had to get home. I was already an hour late. I spat the tooth and a mouthful of bloody saliva into the gutter and ran.