by Simon May
Eventually the Rosenthals requested a quid pro quo. It was early 1945, Soviet forces were moving westwards, and tales of rape and looting were travelling ahead of them. Everyone took it for granted that if they got to Berlin they would impose their own version of hell on the city, beginning with rape.
The Rosenthals’ request was that, if Russian soldiers knocked at the door, the guest was to shield the wife by pretending to rape her. The pretence was to be convincing enough that the soldiers would believe it and not bother to come in. They even practised the ‘rape scene’. Herr Rosenthal would knock on the inside of the front door, and the guest would make for Frau Rosenthal and fake the necessary.
The guest didn’t demur. The Rosenthals were risking their lives protecting him from the Nazis, so he should risk his life protecting them from the Soviets. For, make no mistake, if the soldiers were intent on raping the wife, the man they would shoot first would be the one on top of her.
The plan was ridiculous, of course. The putative rape scene would merely arouse the conquerors’ lust, whether or not they killed the submarine too. Nor would the Rosenthals be assured of any safety. But the deal never got put to the test. One day, they came home from foraging for food to find their guest dead in a chair. A book lay open on the floor, face down.
For the first time, he seemed really dangerous. You could hide a living person but not a corpse, which would begin to smell. If the authorities called at the door, Herr Rosenthal might be accused of murder. And if they discovered that the corpse was Jewish they would shoot him and his wife on the spot.
Herr Rosenthal decided that the only way to make the body disappear was to burn it by night in a freshly bombed building. By now, there was hardly a lack of freshly bombed buildings in Berlin, except where he and his wife lived, in the leafy suburb of Zehlendorf. The streets around them were almost a bomb-free zone.
He waited a day or two in case the British or Americans decided to broaden their targeting policy, enabling him to dispose of the body nearby, but the bombers refused to oblige. So he borrowed the communal car that Ilse used and drove the corpse by night closer to the centre of the city, intending to leave it in the first recently struck building he saw. Approaching a blown-out door that was trying to catch fire, he dropped the submarine onto some smouldering parquet. Little flames were leaping through the far end of the corridor, licking the walls, and would surely make their way to the body.
Rosenthal ran back to his car and watched. Though the sky was streaked with red from fires all over the city and echoing with the droning of Allied planes, he decided to give it a few more minutes before making off. A building that was as badly damaged as that would soon be done for.
As he turned on the motor, he began to hear crackles of disintegration, but it was like a shower of shards; hardly a collapse. He drove out of range and waited for an hour or two as people desperate to escape the area were running by, lugging their pathetic possessions. Leaving without seeing the job through was not on.
As stubborn as that submarine, he thought, as the building refused to gut itself. As ever, his guest seemed to be having the last word.
Finally, Ilse reported, it happened. Maybe it was another bomb, or maybe it was the fire working its way through the edifice. High up, a crashing noise burst into life, releasing a storm cloud of dust into the night sky, and the fire quickly gathered pace. Furious flames rushed up to meet the dissolving masonry like two armies charging at each other. Herr Rosenthal made off. The submarine was no more. He was certain of that.
19.
How did Ilse do it?
How did Ilse hide in plain sight, so calmly and for so long? Whenever I asked her about it, she couldn’t say why she had felt so ‘safe’ – so confident of surviving. She knew, from the earliest deportations, about the concentration camps. She witnessed the bone-numbing fear of the submarines. But she was never afraid. She felt protected, she always told me, despite the fate of her father and uncle; and despite finding the parcel from Sachsenhausen with Theo’s last possessions at her front door.
‘Felt protected by whom?’ I used to persist, expecting her to give me names, beginning with Harald. But I never got a clear answer. She would pause, and the fear or confused vulnerability that so often inhabited her face, especially when it didn’t have a threat to focus on, would surrender to calm, clear assurance. Strength as well as remoteness would flood her countenance at those moments, and I could imagine a room full of vicious Nazis dancing attendance on her.
One thing was confirmed after the war: Ilse’s name wasn’t on any of the surviving records of Jews or Hybrids. That much was clear when she applied for the rations that the American and British occupiers awarded groups who had been persecuted in the Third Reich. Half-Jewish acquaintances of hers were getting the rations, but Ilse was sent away empty-handed: her Jewish identity really had disappeared.
But there must have been more to it than that. As a Jew, or a half-Jew, you didn’t waltz at Babelsberg. You didn’t hang out at the Nazi-infested Trichter dance hall in Hamburg’s amusement district. You didn’t photograph Party officials and Luftwaffe aces, or guilelessly approach your doomed relations in the street. You moved from cellar to cellar in permanent terror of being discovered, or else you stayed at home while your protector dealt with the outside world on your behalf – like Eva Borchardt, one of Moritz’s daughters, who had married a Protestant pastor, Adolf Kurtz, and never left their home in Berlin from 1941 until the end of the war.
Ilse, I am sure, had a more dependable protector than a highly placed client who needed her services, or a kindly aristocrat who arranged for her to be hidden, or a lover with connections to the Swastika: she had the power of her own denial. To elude the Nazis as perfectly as she did, she must first have had to elude herself; to look on her old identity as once foisted on her but since disowned.
Or she might have gone further: she might have felt that she didn’t have any Jewishness to repudiate; that this heritage had nothing to do with her – and never had done. If someone confronted her with the subject, she could stay serene; they were necessarily talking about others.
Perhaps this was why she helped Jews, but had no close Jewish friends; why she spoke of them admiringly but never intimately; and why she recognized Jews on television, but not when the connection was more personal.
Unlike my mother, who struggled her whole life with this immense heritage, Ilse never appeared to engage with it. She didn’t rationalize her Catholicism as ‘updated Judaism’, as my mother so often did, or evince conflicting loyalties and confused dread in the face of the long history of Catholic anti-Semitism. She didn’t agonize out loud about whether Jewish origins could be reconciled with being a contemporary German, or constantly switch identities depending on whom she was with, always defining herself in opposition to them. When she was mingling with Nazis in Babelsberg it surely helped that the fiendish weight of Jewish history seemed to be, as far as it concerned her, somebody else’s dead abstraction. She must have ethnically purged herself in her deepest inwardness. And it probably saved her life.
It wasn’t as if she couldn’t be frightened about other things. Of the three sisters, she seemed the really scared one, at least in the last fifteen years of her life when I saw a lot of her. Especially when it came to loving and being loved, her big round eyes could look haunted, terror-struck, pursued. An ordinary sign of affection might be more than she could bear. A hug, a compliment, or gratitude for the home-made marzipan that she would mail me from Berlin might reduce her to floods of tears. A cozy afternoon in her basement kitchen, talking about family and enjoying the cakes that she baked for my arrival, would become uncomfortable if I told her how deliriously wonderful it was to sit on a wooden chair in Berlin eating cherry cake with her; how I relished her crunchy Streusel, topped with a hillock of whipped cream. Once, as a teenager, I begged her to move to London and she collapsed in tears, overwhelming me with her grief.
Shortly before she died in 1986, when s
he was already in hospital with pain that her doctors couldn’t diagnose, the past showed the first signs of decisively breaking through. She was convinced that men would come in the night and take her and all the other patients in the ward and kill them. Nobody in the hospital was to be trusted. The doctors and nurses might all be operatives of higher up, unseen forces. ‘They want to shoot us,’ she said. ‘In the morning we will all be dead. And I will be the first they will take.’ She didn’t want to sleep, to lose her vigilance. ‘There are bad people everywhere. They will come for us. I know it.’
In the year before she was admitted to hospital I happened to visit Berlin three or four times, and each time I was deeply shaken. She was a changed person. ‘I want to die,’ she kept saying. ‘This world is a terrible world; and it has no purpose.’ ‘Why, Tante Ilse?’ I would ask, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t explain. And she refused all consolation. She didn’t want to hear that we were there for her and that she gave us so infinitely much by being alive. When I hugged her it felt like her spirit recoiled at once to some inner fortress, to which she refused all access, though she always hugged me back. She lost her avid interest in current affairs. Outwardly nothing had changed in her life; nothing recent could explain this sudden abandonment of hope. Events seemed to her to be either banal or evil, but either way not worth living for.
She had moments of joy when we went out for coffee and cake not far from where she lived, or to a restaurant nestled among the tall trees in Berlin’s Grunewald. But, once we had ordered, she became morose again. ‘I just don’t want to go on, I can’t.’ ‘Please go on,’ I begged her, ‘for our sake; you know how much we love you.’ But the love that used to warm her and frighten her, now left her cold.
When we got back into her car afterwards, she usually had what seemed like a medical crisis. She was breathless, clutched her chest, and said she felt inexpressibly terrible. She said she couldn’t drive. I held her, put my arm around her – enough, I hoped, to make her feel consoled but not pitied – and we would sit there, in the car, for up to an hour while she stared downwards, concerned for her heart but refusing to call a doctor. For that hour she couldn’t move, as if she had had a stroke. A dam seemed ready to burst – a dam holding back a whole biography. But then, gradually, she became fine again, switched on the engine, spoke peppily, and drove us home.
Marianne’s World: An Immigrant in London
20.
Stateless at the German Embassy
Unlike her two sisters, who refused to emigrate, my mother escaped the gathering inferno in good time. For her, though, as for my father, it was a hesitant and much-deferred departure. When you love a place as much as they loved Germany, leaving can be painful beyond imagination, even if you have been declared subhuman.
At first my mother merely ‘visited’ England for a few months at a time, from 1934, for lessons with her violin teacher, Max Rostal, who had reconstituted his Berlin classes in London – to where his own teacher and arch rival, Carl Flesch, would soon also relocate.
In their routines and methods, Rostal and Flesch might still have been at the Hochschule für Musik; except, my mother would quip, they now had to cope with the quirks of their new teaching facilities. Wind leaking insistently through the windows and sending their students’ instruments out of tune; rickety plumbing that often deteriorated further when repaired; caretakers who slept on the job and resented being asked to take care of anything. Not to mention the difficulty of finding their new addresses: 3 Smith Gardens might be located in Smith Square; number 42 might be adjacent to number 6; street names were often concealed by shrubbery, and in the case of some, like Strathray Gardens, where Rostal lived, defied pronunciation even after careful practice.
From 1934 until 1938 my mother split her time between Berlin and London for her lessons with Rostal, occasionally being refused entry by the British authorities at Dover and having to take the boat back to the continent to prepare a fresh application, but staying for longer periods each time – until, in the spring of 1938, her passport expired, and she went to the German Embassy in London to renew it.
‘Your birth papers!’ the refined-looking official barked at her from the other side of a wooden desk. Barking, my mother sensed, didn’t come naturally to him.
She presented him with her birth certificate.
‘Your parents’ birth certificates!’ he fired back.
‘I don’t have them.’
‘Their race?’ he demanded.
‘German.’
‘Don’t waste my time! Aryan or not?’
‘Don’t shout at a woman!’
‘What are you doing in England?’
‘I’m a music student.’
‘A student? Why does a German need to study in England? That is hardly necessary! Our education is far better than theirs!’
‘My teacher emigrated—’
‘And music! What do the English know about music? As we Germans say, they are “the land without music” . . . A nation of shopkeepers,’ he added, proud, as my mother recalled it, of quoting Napoleon’s alleged putdown.
‘I’m studying with a German.’
‘A German?’ His glance was vicious. ‘What sort of German, one can only ask. Besides, you seem to spend long periods here,’ he remarked, surveying the densely stamped visa pages. ‘Do you really need to be here just to study? And why do the British allow you to remain for so long if you are merely a student?’
My mother was sure he knew the answer: she could stay because of her Jewish parentage. The identity to which she confessed had been well rehearsed: to the British she was a Jewish refugee, to the Germans a non-Jewish student. Those identities had – so far – enabled her to move between the two countries.
‘I must inform you,’ the official said, after he had leafed through the visa pages, ‘that if you return to Germany without a valid passport, for which we will need the birth certificates of your parents and grandparents, you will be immediately transferred to a special camp.’ And he slapped the useless document onto his desk and fixed her with a stare of blank indifference.
My mother said nothing. When I asked her what she thought he’d meant by a ‘special camp’, she said she hadn’t bothered to ask him, but had merely slid the elapsed document towards him, and returned his contempt with a look of disdain.
As she used to say with a defiant chuckle: ‘I had finally left Germany. For good.’
21.
The past cannot be predicted
Why exactly she ‘finally left Germany’ was to be argued over for the rest of her life. Ursel insisted that my mother had merely followed her Jewish teacher, who had been forced to emigrate. Ilse went blank when the matter was raised; if pressed for an answer she said that Marianne had left for the sake of her teacher, but might also have found studying in Nazi Germany ‘difficult’. My mother echoed Ursel’s position when speaking to Jews. When speaking to most Germans, however, the reason was clearly her Jewish origins. Unless we happened to be visiting German families who, she worried, might not find such origins palatable.
Here, no reason at all was volunteered – my mother had left for England and that was that. Even the period of her emigration was kept vague. When our hosts enquired whom she had married, it was simply stated that my father was a ‘German’ who had also happened to find himself in England. What could be more natural, my mother seemed to imply, than for two Germans marooned on this alien island to seek refuge in each other?
Occasionally one of the less formal denizens of these German homes – for most seemed very reserved in those days, back in the early 1970s – would send the conversation into perilous territory by asking my mother the awkward question: ‘Wasn’t it hard for you, as a German, to abandon your homeland?’
At once the room seemed charged with menace. We all looked at each other. Who was going to answer? We children knew that the J-subject was under no circumstances to be raised by us in front of these particular hosts, even now, a quarter century or
more after the end of the war.
As a child I did what was expected of me and kept silent. My silence felt cowardly, and I longed to blurt out the truth and be liberated from this infernal circus of ethnic evasion. Why did we have to go on living as if the Third Reich were alive and kicking? As if the identity of ‘Jew’ or ‘Hybrid of the First Degree’ were still a passport to social death? As if the Reich Kinship Office and its team of anthropologists were decreeing who we were or weren’t? But we had to: the topic remained a harbinger of unspeakable and insoluble pain for my mother and her sisters; and loyalty to them, fear of being doused in their hidden terrors, and incredulity that this identity could really be mine inhibited me from any dash for freedom.
My mother would sometimes relieve these stilted exchanges with a matter-of-fact admission that she had been studying with a teacher who had left in the 1930s. And that she had ‘followed’ him. She had emigrated because her teacher had emigrated.
The menace became confused. Why had the teacher emigrated? Now she would suggest something quite unexpected. What career prospects, she demanded, did a young violin teacher have in 1930s Germany, amid the country’s high unemployment and social chaos? Britain offered far better opportunities. This was the cue for her to praise everything British in terms so extravagant that the country became unrecognizable. Things went on there, she said, that made Germany seem an ineffectual backwater. Its economy? It far outstripped Germany’s! Its educational system? What those children learn! You can’t imagine it: at ten, my son could help his eighteen-year-old German cousin with her maths homework. The hospitals? The best and cleanest in the world. The people? Well mannered, sophisticated, and progressive, if not always neatly dressed. Efficiency? Sometimes a little wanting, but that is the flip side of a freedom-loving nature. Criminality? You hardly see any. If a youth stumbles on a gold watch in the street, they will place it considerately on a garden fence or hand it in at the nearest police station in the hope that it will be swiftly reunited with its owner.
