How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  ‘Only if I can gain access to my house – or rather, my neighbour’s house. I have the necessary equipment for developing films there. It’s in the exclusion zone, so I’ll need a permit.’

  ‘That will be impossible,’ the soldier answered.

  ‘I’ll do a perfect job for you. I’m a professional photographer.’

  ‘Well, maybe we can get you a permit, but only at night,’ he relented. He must have been worried about the precedent – about discipline breaking down if other Germans saw Ilse moving in and out of the zone with impunity.

  Within twenty-four hours, Ilse had a permit for a single night-time visit to her street, and only to work. She would have to develop the photos and then leave at once.

  Beside herself with excitement, she returned to Geri and Eva’s house as soon as night had fallen; but she couldn’t resist going to see hers first. Though it was an absurd risk to take – returning to your requisitioned house was forbidden – the front door was ajar and strains of the ‘Charleston’ being played on the piano were leaking into the melancholy air outside.

  As she approached the entrance, she passed several pieces of my grandparents’ furniture that had been dumped on the pavement, stamped with the words ‘US Army Property’. Ilse knocked and, without waiting for an answer, crept into what had become her almost unrecognizable living room.

  ‘Well, hello!’ came a Southern drawl from a corner. ‘What do you want here?’

  A young priest with, Ilse reported affectionately, the politest manner emerged from her mother’s bedroom. She wasn’t frightened; he hardly looked the type to lead the charge in a rape scene or even to try gentle seduction.

  ‘Chaplain Sellars,’ he announced. ‘Lieutenant in the US Army.’

  Ilse’s relief at seeing this considerate house-sitter was tempered by the pink, purple, and yellow walls and the clunky furniture that filled the place. The priest was charming, but his taste in interior decoration was awful. The place looked like a dilapidated bordello.

  ‘My furniture?’ she enquired. ‘I know I’m not really allowed in here, but I did get a permit to return.’ And she told him about the encounter with the soldier.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he interrupted, ‘I just don’t like all that wood. Your furniture is out on the street.’

  ‘I saw – can we put it in the garage? To protect it from rain and theft?’

  ‘Sure, ma’am. There’s more in the back garden.’

  The back garden! Of course, she had buried those heirlooms there, and in the park. Hopefully they wouldn’t discover those.

  ‘As you know, ma’am, we can’t return the furniture to you,’ Sellars added, concerned that he might have given Ilse the impression that it was still hers.

  ‘But you don’t want it anyway,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Ma’am, we aren’t allowed to give requisitioned property back to Germans.’

  ‘But we aren’t really German.’

  He looked puzzled.

  ‘My father was Jewish; he was persecuted,’ Ilse stammered. (As Ilse tells me this story, I realize it is one of the very few times she has ever spoken to me of such things.)

  ‘Are there Jews left here?’ the priest asked, surprised.

  ‘Of course there are! Especially mixtures, you know.’

  ‘How about the photos?’ Sellars added. ‘You’ve only got a few hours.’

  ‘Yes, the photos! The equipment is all at our neighbours’ house, next door.’

  He couldn’t hide his disappointment that she had to go.

  ‘You used to play this piano?’ he asked. ‘Next time you’re here to develop photos, it’d be nice if you’d play something for me.’ It seemed like the rules allowed him to engage her to entertain him, provided this was categorized as a service and not as friendly contact.

  Ilse shrugged. ‘I can’t play very well.’

  ‘I love shopping,’ Sellars said. ‘In fact, I’m a shopping addict.’

  ‘Shopping?’

  ‘Yeah, that guy who wrote all those lilting mazurkas and waltzes. You say you play the piano and you don’t know shopping!’

  It took a moment for the penny to drop. ‘Oh, you mean Chopin!’ she exclaimed. ‘Far too hard. No, I can’t play Chopin for you.’

  As she developed the fifty-three rolls of film, she found herself dwelling on this charmer of a priest. I wonder if he’s Catholic or Protestant? she mused to herself. He must be Catholic, she decided.

  30.

  Ilse’s Nazi flag business

  The soldier was so delighted with Ilse’s work that he commissioned her not only to develop more films but also to photograph American troops within the exclusion zone. Soon she had a thriving business and was being paid in exotic fruit like oranges and bananas, as well as in coal, wood, and coffee, and sometimes a packet of cigarettes that she could sell on the black market. She shared these bounties with her friends, paid her rent with them, and quickly became one of the most sought-after tenants on the edge of the zone.

  Then she had her big idea. The Americans kept asking where they could find souvenirs of the defeated regime. Nazi flags, helmets, boots, Wehrmacht uniforms, and – fetching a premium price – SS knick-knacks. Ilse put the word out among her contacts. Within weeks she was inundated with memorabilia. Of course, there were lots of fakes among them. One man turned up with what he claimed was Hitler’s personal telephone, which he had retrieved from the bunker where the Führer had committed suicide with Eva Braun. The story was improbable, as the Soviets, who had got to the bunker first, wouldn’t have missed a trophy as good as Hitler’s telephone. But, back in Kansas or Utah, who would know? Nobody was asking for authentication anyway. The telephone from which Hitler had supposedly dispatched his ever-loonier orders for the last stand in Berlin fetched good money.

  Demand was far outstripping supply, even after Ilse stopped weeding out the worst fakes. But the gory stuff, which was the most profitable, was hard to come by and even harder to manufacture. Sewing one of those fearsome black SS jackets was a big job. Ilse tried etching the SS motto ‘Meine Ehre heißt Treue!’ – ‘My honour is called loyalty!’ – into knives and daggers she picked up in ruined buildings or from friends who’d been in the army, but it didn’t look right. Then she realized that the symbol most obviously identified with this bizarre regime that had boasted it would rule over a racially purified world for a thousand years was the Nazi flag. So she found first one tailor, then two, then a whole production line of them, and ordered them to make Nazi flags.

  ‘But we have no material!’ was their obvious protest.

  ‘I have material,’ Ilse replied. ‘My street, our whole area, was occupied by the Soviets and there are flags with the hammer and sickle everywhere. In the centre of Berlin, near the Reichstag, if you look into cellars and storerooms you will also find Soviet flags – thousands of them.’

  It was a superb business model. There was a limited supply of Nazi memorabilia. The Soviets had hauled a lot of it off when they looted the ministries and homes of Hitler and his henchmen. But there was a practically limitless supply of red flags, as Stalin had ordered his troops to flood the defeated capital with them, to rub in his heroic victory. The flags were already cut to size and attached to wooden staffs. All that remained was to find the dyes to turn them into Nazi flags. Geri and Eva’s house, which Ilse had occupied with her photographic equipment, now became a centre of operations for a lucrative business.

  In return, the Americans gave her not just any food and cigarettes, but rarities like liver pâté and Marlboros, as well as nylon socks and good coats. Some of this she bartered for fresh meat and vegetables, with which she fed her family and a dozen friends. She herself hadn’t eaten better or enjoyed classier cigarettes for a long time.

  31.

  Chaplain Sellars

  Ilse’s nocturnal permits to visit her studio in Geri and Eva’s house were eventually replaced by day passes, and then, as restrictions on Germans were eased, she was allowed to return ho
me.

  Well, not home, because Chaplain Sellars was still occupying my grandmother’s house, now with another US army chaplain. Home had to be at Geri and Eva’s, next door, where she lived for over a year, until early 1947, when Monika returned with her husband and their young daughter from Westphalia, to where they had fled as the endgame approached in Berlin.

  There had been a buzz between Ilse and Sellars from the moment they met. Though Sellars knew that he wasn’t allowed to give back my grandmother’s furniture, one night he whispered to Ilse from across the garden fence that he wouldn’t object if she removed everything from the garage. Anyway, she could always pay him in Nazi flags if necessary; then the transfer would be a sale, not a restitution. Or, better still, she could replace the furniture with old beds and chests of drawers that she might find elsewhere, so that it wouldn’t look as if hers had been returned. With the Marlboros she’d earned, she could buy a lot of used furniture.

  Ilse’s friendship with Sellars deepened. They couldn’t be seen going in and out of each other’s houses, but they could simultaneously have dinner in their adjoining gardens. He shared things with her that she couldn’t find on the black market – things like canned spam and whisky. She cooked with his ingredients and passed the dishes back across the fence. And Sellars was very kind to her son, whose father, Harald Böhmelt, had broken up with Ilse after she’d refused to marry him, and now lived in another German city. Sellars took the boy on excursions to nearby lakes in the Americans’ big military vehicles and to parties for the GIs’ kids. Most importantly, he got Ilse fresh commissions to photograph the troops.

  It was more work than she could manage, at least with the equipment she’d rescued from her atelier in the Budapesterstrasse. She had left the best behind; it was too heavy to carry and hopefully it would be too heavy for the city’s looters. So Ilse did what few Germans could have done: she convinced Sellars to take the risk of persuading some GIs to fetch for her whatever they could load onto a US Army truck.

  Soon her surviving cameras and dark-room tools were set up in Geri and Eva’s house. Sellars also put her in touch with the buyers at one of the special shops for American soldiers – the so-called ‘PX shops’. It was a privilege for a German to supply one of those shops. You didn’t only get an income and the occasional goodie; you were also recognized as an insider. And this earned you the trust to be allowed to move more freely around the city. As well as a little envy from less fortunate Germans.

  One of them, whom I met in Zehlendorf in 2006, remembered Ilse from those far-off days. ‘Ilse was smarter than the rest of us. She looked better-fed. She was a Big Fish. She had contacts with the Americans. High-up ones.’

  ‘How did you know about her contacts with the Americans?’ I asked her, as we sat drinking tea, almost exactly sixty years later.

  ‘I worked as a cashier in the PX shop where she used to bring her stuff to sell,’ the woman replied. ‘The quality of the things she brought for the GIs kept getting better. You could tell that she was popular – with both her sellers and her buyers. She seemed particularly well in with one American, a priest.’

  ‘Oh really?’

  ‘Yes, one evening as I was walking home after work, I passed a house and saw Ilse standing by the front door, chatting with a pastor with a dog collar. This woman looks so much more relaxed and healthy than the rest of us, I thought. Then I said to myself: But that’s the same woman who sells things to our shop. This must be her house. Or else the priest is her boyfriend!’

  By 1955, the house was no longer pink, nor did the inside look like a dilapidated bordello. The American Army paid for it to be redecorated before finally returning it to my family, a decade after Chaplain Sellars had moved in.

  32.

  Ilse in the parsonage

  If you had survived the war as a Jew or half-Jew in Germany, and you still didn’t want to be saddled with that heritage, you either had to keep remembering to forget who you were, or you had to escape to a place like America or Britain where the word ‘Jew’ didn’t trigger in your fellow citizens the insolubly complex feelings, the almost physical shock, that history has ensured it so often does in post-war Germany.

  As I see it, Ilse had always been masterful at forgetting herself. But since there was no longer an enemy out there with jackboots and Final Solutions, she now had to be the pursuer as well as the pursued. With the Nazis gone, she had to flee from her Jewishness all the more decisively. Abandoning her professional photography in 1948 in order to live with two priests in a Catholic parsonage might have been part of that flight.

  By then she had another reason to want to leave her old life in Berlin. Her Elysian relations with the US Army, her access to products to sell to the PX shop, and the dinners across the garden fence with Chaplain Sellars were threatened by the atmosphere of emergency in the city. It was rumoured that Stalin wanted the Western-held sectors for the Soviet Union, and that he was going to blockade them into submission. As a result, the Americans were now on high alert and there was a run on food and fuel.

  The parsonage where she found a job as housekeeper was in the northern port city of Kiel, and it boasted lavish parties and excellent food. Ilse was its only live-in woman and quickly attracted the attention of the senior priest, Pastor Rudolf, a larger-than-life gourmet, wine-lover, and womanizer, who filled his salon with musicians and writers. As it happened, this flirtatious Epicurean in a cassock was known to our family already, having met Ursel while she was still engaged at the theatre in Bremen. His seduction ritual, she reported, was charming, witty, and almost irresistible.

  For the most part, Rudolf’s brand of Catholicism suited Ilse well. Despite Germany’s social chaos after the war, people still had time to frown on single mothers and their ‘illegitimate’ children; and in this Catholic refuge Ilse found unquestioning acceptance of her position. As important, she also found in Rudolf a mentor for her Catholicism, which had become ever more ardent during the course of the war.

  Ironically, this ardour might have made her a single mother. When, in late 1941, she discovered that she was pregnant by Harald Böhmelt, and Harald hoped this would finally force her to agree to marry him, she declined in advance. This wasn’t because of his membership of the Nazi Party, or because she feared having to produce Aryan credentials at a wedding ceremony; rather, she demanded, as a condition of marriage, that he, a Protestant, commit to raising their child a Catholic. When he refused, pleading for the child to be given a choice at thirteen, Ilse abandoned their relationship. That and not the Nazi race laws, it was said by some in the family, was the real reason why she never married him, even after the war.

  Or was it? There was also the fact that Harald had fathered a second child with someone else at around the time that he made Ilse pregnant. A daughter was born to this other woman in 1942, a few weeks after Ilse gave birth to her son. At last, it seemed, the real reason for Ilse not marrying Harald had come to light.

  Or – again – had it? Ilse seemed happier without a man about the house; Catholic priests, who were forbidden to marry, suited her better than a husband. Ursel insisted that Pastor Rudolf and her sister had enjoyed a steady relationship, but my mother doubted that was what happened. It is true that she was close to him and would also later go on holidays with his handsome deputy; but though both priests became her confidantes and friends, that, my mother felt, was where Ilse would have wanted it to stop.

  Whatever happened in the parsonage, the reality is that, apart from the four priests – the two Americans in Berlin and the two Germans with whom she lived in Kiel – this sensitive, generous, and loving woman was not known to have had any intimate relationship with a peer between 1942 and her death in 1986.

  33.

  The Jewish altar server

  The Nazis were history. In Germany, Jews were safe. In Britain, Germans had long ceased to be ‘enemy aliens’. Yet, even before I was born, my parents were quarrelling over my identity.

  The only thing they agre
ed on was that I was to be raised neither as a German nor as a Jew. Speaking German to me or giving me any form of Jewish education were therefore out of the question. It also went without saying, but was repeatedly said, that I was under no circumstances to think of myself as British. Though I would be born, raised, and educated in Britain and have English as my mother tongue, to regard myself as British would be a ‘betrayal’ of who I was – whoever that might be.

  The big question was whether I should be raised a Catholic. My mother said yes. My father said no. Though he came from a line of devout Bible scholars, he had no detectable attachment to the Jewish faith and kept none of its festivals. But he had abysmal memories of Catholics in his native Rhineland, of being chased down alleyways by Jew-baiting classmates, and of the standard-issue taunting about his family’s sacrilegious thirst for the blood of Christian babies.

  Besides, he thought he had made a big enough concession to Catholicism already: he had reluctantly agreed to my mother’s demand to marry in a Catholic church, and, to that end, had undergone investigations by clergy uneasy about marrying her to a divorced Jew.

  It wasn’t the Jewish bit that concerned the Church; it was the divorce from his first wife, Hilde. My parents were astonished to learn that the Catholic Church regarded even the divorce of two non-Catholics, whom it didn’t marry, as illegitimate. Any marriage, they were told, is a binding decision in the eyes of God, whether or not the parties to it believe He exists; and so an atheist or a Jewish or a Buddhist marriage may no more be undone than a Catholic one.

  It seemed like an impasse – until my father had an inspired idea. He was Hilde’s second husband; she had been briefly married to a German she had met while holidaying on the Spanish Riviera. The Church had to be consistent about its doctrine. If he had married a divorced woman, his marriage was surely illegitimate in its eyes. Which meant that he was still technically a bachelor!