How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  Though it was, in some ways, easier to remain unnoticed in a city, the danger was that Amsterdam was full of German soldiers. Occasionally one knocked at their door or stopped Franziskus in the street while he was foraging for food. He always claimed to understand no German and produced his forged ID, fearful of bumping into a soldier who sniffed out the deception.

  And then, on an early spring day in 1945, that moment came. Allied troops were now flooding Amsterdam and, in their wake, Franziskus and Ursel were enjoying a new-found sense of safety. Too soon, it turned out. He was searching for bread when he was stopped for a routine check. Though, as always, he spoke Dutch, he accidentally uttered a German word or two. The young sergeant noticed his perfect accent and, crucially, saw the panic in his eyes, betraying his realization that he had made a lethal error.

  But the man who arrested him wasn’t German. He was Canadian. Though Franziskus could scarcely believe his luck not to be in German handcuffs, his relief wouldn’t last long. Incredibly, the liberators, overwhelmed by the task of maintaining discipline among vast numbers of defeated Wehrmacht fighters, not to mention the logistics of disarming and repatriating them, were handing captured Germans back to their commanders. And German court martials were continuing to try deserters under Nazi military law. For Franziskus, the sentence was a foregone conclusion.

  Extraordinary good fortune was, however, to intervene – and this time to endure.

  At Franziskus’s trial, a colleague from his time fighting with Rommel in Africa happened to be present in the courtroom, and he saved his life. As the presiding judge – a Nazi ranting in a crescendo of fury against people he claimed were traitors and cowards eager to stab their own compatriots in the back as soon as they saw that the war was being lost – was about to pronounce sentence, the former colleague interjected: ‘That man momentarily lost his reason, but he is one of our finest officers. He saved the lives of so many of our men in Africa! He is a patriot of the Reich, and he should be pardoned!’

  Not long after his astonishing reprieve, Franziskus hastened to a remote estate in the north-west of Germany, near the Dutch border, that belonged to a relation of his, a Baron Knyphausen. While in hiding, he and Ursel had agreed that in case they got separated they should try to meet up there; but when he got to the estate, he found no sign of her. Was she still living in their last refuge? Were the occupying Allied forces treating her well? He knew she was pregnant with their first child. What would happen if there were medical complications?

  What he didn’t know was that Ursel was not hiding without help in an attic, but living it up in one of Amsterdam’s most exclusive maternity clinics.

  Ilse’s World: Fearless in Berlin

  16.

  Dancing at Babelsberg

  Ursel’s bravado was remarkable enough, but how did Ilse do it?

  Throughout the Third Reich, she lived, so she repeatedly told me, as if she had nothing to fear. She didn’t go into hiding or take an assumed name. She didn’t try to get herself certified as Aryan, or marry into a new identity. Emigration – with which I think Ursel briefly toyed when her former Berlin acting teacher suggested she join her in Hollywood – was out of the question.

  On the contrary, Ilse continued to dwell with brazen normality at the heart of Hitler’s Berlin. She worked as a photographer on Budapesterstrasse until her atelier was bombed in 1944, openly advertising her services and counting high Nazis among her satisfied customers. She spent the ever more dangerous years from 1935 to 1942 with a card-carrying Nazi, with whom she waltzed at Babelsberg while other Hybrids of the First Degree were undergoing gradual social death. She survived the war in Berlin, collecting the food coupons to which Aryans were entitled and dealing with the myriad officials who interfered in citizens’ daily lives, without once being menaced by a knock on the door – all while other half-Jews were cowering in basements until a rumour, a random enquiry, or a neighbour’s unusual glance forced their courageous hosts to throw them to their fate. She gave birth to a son, fathered by Harald Böhmelt, in Berlin’s Franziskus clinic in the summer of 1942, a few months after the Holocaust was set in train. The worst harassment she suffered was the ogling of men or their dull proposals of marriage – of which her unpossessable beauty attracted a steady stream.

  She knew about the innumerable decrees, some of them all the more gruesome for their bizarreness, such as the ban on Jews owning carrier pigeons or buying soap and shaving cream; and she saw the assembly points where knots of the doomed were awaiting deportation. But the invitations to glittering evenings never abated, even as Jewish lives were being smashed to destruction. It was as if she was hiding herself by flaunting herself.

  One of Ilse’s clients, a First World War fighter pilot ace called Ernst Udet, who was helping Göring build up the Luftwaffe, regularly invited her to the debauched parties he threw. Udet was a star of 1930s Berlin who moved easily between affairs of state and bohemian free-spiritedness, and felt much at home among the film producers, composers, and actors with whom Harald and Ilse mixed. He had swagger, she said, but didn’t strut with the grim earnestness of Hitler’s senior henchmen. His face wasn’t laminated with privilege like Göring’s; nor did he slyly conceal private sensual pleasures behind a public show of rectitude. He became rich at a time of economic depression from his bestselling autobiography and from films that became world-famous, packed with his low-flying stunts. One of his most daring numbers, Ilse reported, was to fly under a bridge and then snatch a handkerchief from the ground with his wing tip. Udet was his own man; he loved women and soft drugs, and he made little secret of it.

  So too did another of her clients, an actor called Heinrich George, a former communist who had effortlessly converted to Nazism and entertained Party bosses, artists, and businessmen in the living room at his villa near the Wannsee, where statues of Hitler and Stalin glowered at each other from opposite corners. ‘I moved over from him to him,’ he would stammer, a glass of champagne listing in his hand, while his guests lounged on soft cushions, cuddled in corners, or watched films projected onto a wall-to-wall screen.

  Then there were the splendid evenings at Ufa’s studios in Babelsberg, just outside Berlin, where films like The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich’s talkie, had been made, and where the roaring Twenties, with their bohemian cheek and cynical humour, had found their way into celluloid – but which was now a diligent valet of the Nazi worldview. Though it swarmed with Party members and had of course dismissed its Jewish directors and actors, it seems that nobody at Ufa knew about Ilse’s ancestry. Dancing on Böhmelt’s arm with delicious impunity before and into the early part of the war, Ilse felt that Babelsberg was like a utopian space insulated from politics, a world unto itself of dizzying safety.

  Indeed, between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of war, Ilse even found herself accompanying Böhmelt to the Führer’s official residence in Berlin, where Hitler was throwing a party for a handful of favoured artists, designers, architects, and composers – no more than sixty in total. As she recounted it in her matter-of-fact manner, as if not even a moment as surreal as this could faze her, she and Harald were stunned by the opulence of it all, less because much of Germany was still suffering from grinding poverty than because it echoed the order that emanated from the Führer and that was in turn reflected in the perfection of every detail: the furniture, the carpets, the coasters, the saucers, the lampshades, the Turkish cushions, the marble ashtrays, and the clichéd sculptures of ideal male and female forms. Not to mention the caviar, which particularly impressed Böhmelt with its shiny, briny, gold-black radiance. Endless varieties of meat and vegetables and fish were laid out on Meissen dishes in the light of shimmering candles. Aromas seeped indoors from a spotlit patio as bottles of champagne and German Rieslings criss-crossed the room, carried in the grip of white gloves. Hitler himself chatted vivaciously, but his attention, Ilse reported, seemed far away. He ate nothing and drank nothing. He was withdrawn as only a god can be. Or perhaps he was bored.
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br />   At the same time, Ilse and Harald consorted with many figures unbeloved of Hitler. They were close to Werner Finck, co-founder of the political cabaret Die Katakombe (The Catacombs), where Isa Vermehren, Ursel’s friend, had found work and which, Finck relates in his memoirs, he had conceived in Harald’s house.30 They spent many weekends with Otto Dix, the ‘degenerate’ artist, whom Ilse found cheerful, despite his stunted career. She often saw the banned writer Erich Kästner, author of such international bestsellers as Emil and the Detectives, who called her ‘my chauffeur’ because she ferried him around in her car and who enervated her with his mother-worship, his pessimism, and his back-seat driving.

  Most of these people had time on their hands: Finck had seen his cabaret closed by Goebbels in 1935 and was then briefly interned in a concentration camp. Kästner, who had gone to see his own books burned in the presence of Goebbels in 1933, couldn’t publish under his real name. Other writers, like Hans Fallada, with whom Böhmelt had collaborated in making the film Kleiner Man – was nun?, and Peter Franke, were keeping a low profile. Ilse would join groups of them for weekends in the lovely Harz mountains, or at Finck’s cottage near Potsdam, or in the Reeperbahn amusement district of Hamburg, where they whiled away long evenings at the then-famous dance hall, Ballhaus Trichter.

  But what none of these people knew was that, by 1941, Ilse had another life. A dangerous and almost entirely secret one.

  17.

  Ilse, Christabel, and the ‘submarines’

  Ilse did it mainly at night: helping to hide and feed Jews stranded in Berlin. Her contacts sprang from a very different social milieu to the writers and artists with whom she spent so many evenings and weekends. It was the aristocratic world of Adam von Trott zu Solz, who would later become an active resister and was hanged by the Nazis in August 1944; and of the Alvenslebens, whom Ilse had met through Ursel’s friend Lexi.

  The aristocrats whom Ilse knew weren’t hiding Jews in their own homes, but a network of people had crystallized around them to provide intermittent shelter for Jews on the run. Known as ‘submarines’, these Jews had discarded the yellow stars, emblazoned in black with the word ‘Jude’, that they’d been forced to wear from September 1941 – on the left side of their chest, right over their heart. They’d then gone underground wherever they could find refuge – whether for one night, for one month, or, if they were exceptionally fortunate, for longer.

  One member of the network was Christabel Bielenberg, née Burton, a young Anglo-Irish woman married to Peter Bielenberg, a lawyer who was later interned in a concentration camp. Christabel was intelligent, bold, resilient, and astonishingly well connected, in England and Ireland as well as in Germany, thanks not least to her uncles, the newspaper barons Lord Rothermere and Lord Northcliffe.

  In her memoir When I Was a German, she records how Ilse confronted her with a Jewish couple who urgently needed refuge. Christabel agonized – then told them they could stay two nights, but that was it. It was the winter of 1942:

  She had a blonde woman with her that morning; rather extra blonde who, after shaking my hand, hesitated on the doorstep and seemed unwilling to come into the house. Ilse, too, seemed satisfied that her companion should stay outside and, after glancing at our telephone to see that it was not plugged in, she explained why. The woman was a Jewess. She had removed her star when the Gestapo had come hammering at the door of her flat, and she and her husband had clambered down the fire escape and had been living in attics and cellars ever since. A safe hairdresser had dyed her hair and, latterly, a priest had housed them in his attic; but some members of his flock, pious Catholics all, had recently been making discreet but pointed enquiries. Since yesterday the good Father had felt himself and his house to be under surveillance. Ilse explained that the priest had not asked his lodgers to leave, but they knew that the time had come, and now they had no place to go. She added that the woman could pass as an Aryan . . . It was a little time I suppose before my thoughts returned to the silent sitting room and I remembered to tell Ilse to ask her companion to come in, because of course I knew that outside the front door, waiting patiently beside the doorstep was something more than an unknown woman with dyed blonde hair. Whether I liked it or not, prepared or unprepared, the moment had come to me.31

  What Ilse did was brilliantly courageous. Of the few Germans who were resisting at all, even fewer were doing anything for the Jews. And those who were, were hardly Jewish themselves. But did helping to hide Jews also buttress Ilse’s belief that she wasn’t one of them? That they, not she, needed hiding?

  At around the same time as Ilse confronted Christabel with the two submarines, over the winter of 1942–3, she unexpectedly received a parcel containing her uncle Theo’s last possessions – among them his Judenpass, the identity card marked with a large J that Jews were required to carry – neatly wrapped in layers of brown paper. It was addressed to her and was sent from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of Berlin, to which Theo had been deported. It seems extraordinary that any concentration camp would send its victims’ possessions to anyone, and incomprehensible that the authorities, who must have known that Ilse was next of kin to a Jew, would politely return his personal effects, listed in an officially stamped inventory, instead of coming for her too. But that is what they did.

  She hadn’t seen Theo for a very long time by then. As she recounted it, their last meeting was a chance encounter on a street corner in Berlin in late 1941. Her uncle wears the compulsory yellow star; his eyes are sunken; he is thin, depressed, hunched, uncommunicative. He looks away, whispering to her not to address him – for her own protection.

  ‘What a coincidence!’ Ilse exclaims delightedly.

  ‘Go away,’ he hisses.

  ‘Uncle Theo, why are you so unfriendly? Have we done anything wrong?’

  Her naivety must have seemed aggressive. How could Ilse, who was hiding Jews from certain death, ask her own uncle such a question? Yet, four decades later, she reports this exchange to me in baffled tones, as if Theo didn’t realize that she knew exactly what one could and could not get away with in Nazi Berlin.

  ‘Go away, go away,’ he repeats, trying not to look nervously around him.

  ‘We miss you, Uncle Theo! I’ll come and fetch you by car. Then you’ll have no excuses!’

  He starts to walk away.

  ‘Theo!’ Ilse calls, as she catches up with him again. ‘Well, at least let’s have a bite together. We haven’t seen you for ages.’

  She still doesn’t get it.

  Finally, he points to his yellow star, and murmurs, ‘You and Emmy will both be in terrible danger if they see you with me. Go now.’

  ‘Danger? No, don’t be silly! I will talk to whomever I want!’

  He gives her a haunted stare.

  ‘Please, Theo, you’re so elusive.’

  He walks off. The encounter has barely lasted five minutes. She will never see him again.

  18.

  The Rosenthals and their guest

  The Rosenthals were stalwarts of Ilse’s network. They were, she said, two of those magnificent working-class Berliners: irreverent, quick-minded, by turns unpredictably warm and stunningly brusque, given to acerbic humour and rapid-fire observations, freedom-loving without puffing themselves up with an ideology of freedom, contemptuous of the Nazis, and unaware of the world of tact.

  They also got things done. They seemed to live a plodding life, keeping themselves to themselves, but they could work the system brilliantly, and always managed to get food coupons and find heating oil for themselves and for friends, even towards the end of the war when everything was in desperately short supply. Who would have thought that they hid Jews?

  In early 1943, as they were about to go to bed, there was a gentle knock on their front door. It was Ilse. Herr Rosenthal knew what it was about. He and his wife had agreed to shelter another of the submarines. With Ilse was a middle-aged man without a family. He stood proudly but matter-of-factly next to her, dete
rmined not to look piteous. Ilse sensed that his determination appealed to them.

  The man spent one night in the cellar. Then two. Then a month. In the end, Ilse told me, it was nearly two years. The Rosenthals’ bluff exteriors must have hidden conscience and courage and generosity of an uncommon order; but, as she described them, they weren’t the type to congratulate themselves on their morality.

  Herr Rosenthal and the submarine became like a married couple, which hardly seemed to bother Frau Rosenthal, who spent most of her time knitting and reading adventure stories by Karl May and keeping to her household routine as if nothing had changed in the world outside. She placed meals dutifully on the table for both men three times a day for two years, and afterwards ate quietly by herself.

  The Rosenthals reported back to Ilse how they and their guest quarrelled over who would scrub the vegetables, while there were vegetables to scrub. The guest was bookish and would chide his hosts for not knowing about the great German masters of music and literature. He taught them poems by Goethe and their setting to music by Schubert. He talked about philosophy with them, or rather to them. They became friends, bonded by respect, affection, duty, habit, and much else. But not by guilt or shame. None of them acted out of guilt or shame.

  Nonetheless, Ilse said, the guest started getting on Herr Rosenthal’s nerves, and eventually on his wife’s too. He complained about the food. It wasn’t the scarcity that irked him; rather it was the preparation, and the presentation. He had lived a comfortable life before the war and had refused to leave Germany when he could have. Nor would he think of abandoning his routines: food carefully cooked and seasoned and tastefully laid out on the plate, even if there was next to nothing of it; clean tablecloths; folded napkins; and good conversation. To say that this was pointless in the terrible conditions of war was defeatist: part of a deeper succumbing to the Nazis and the barbarism they had brought about. Too many people had done that. Table napkins were a way of defying Hitler. Like the Rosenthals, their guest intended to keep going.