The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  Kurt and Ruth had postponed marriage pending resolution of their emigrant status. Now, despairing of their chances of getting to the United States, determined to grab what happiness they could, they were married. Then, suddenly, the American consulate, which had stopped issuing visas when the quota was filled, began to issue them again after the new year. Once Anna had bought their passages, they packed their trunks and suitcases and sent most of them off to American Express. The American consulate summoned them to complete the formalities for immigration. But exit visas from the German government never materialized, and soon the German government suspended all but special emigration visas.

  And so they had lived, their situation constantly deteriorating, their friends and relatives disappearing, until the night in November 1942 when Ruth received the Gestapo summons.

  In the weeks following their flight into illegality Kurt came often to the Barsches’, where Ruth was living with Hilde Hohn, the S.S. officer’s wife, and Ruth would visit him at the Kaiserallee apartment of Lea, Kurt’s former wife. When Lea was in Munich visiting her daughter, Ruth would stay overnight. Soon she began to spend some nights with Kurt even when Lea was there. Ruth was not worried about Kurt’s proximity to Lea; she was a woman past sixty, and Ruth was twenty-six.

  Lea lived in an old Berlin apartment that had three large rooms in the front. A long hallway led from these rooms to the kitchen; several bedrooms were off the hallway. At the end of the hallway was a back door. This was to be Kurt’s escape route if anyone came for him. The door that separated the front rooms from the hallway was always to remain closed.

  On February 19, 1943, Ruth had two appointments. First she was to meet Hilde late that afternoon at the railway station to help her with the packages of food Hilde was bringing from her in-laws’ estate in the country. Then Ruth was to meet her husband, bringing him some of the food. But Hilde’s train was late. Ruth called Kurt to tell him and said that she would call again after she had deposited Hilde and the packages at the Barsches’ apartment.

  A short while later there was a knock on the door of the Kaiserallee apartment. Lea answered. It was the Gestapo, come to investigate a report that a Jew was living with her. In a loud, angry voice she denied the charge—just as Kurt came rushing in to investigate the commotion. He knocked one of them down, but then they subdued him and led him off.

  When Ruth called from Hilde’s to say she was on her way she was told what had happened. Frantic, she begged Lea to offer money to the Gestapo in exchange for Kurt’s passage to Switzerland. But Lea, who herself had been spared by the Gestapo only because Kurt had once been her husband, was afraid to risk herself further, and her son by a previous marriage prevailed on her not to try.

  So Kurt was gone, and Ruth could only wonder when, if ever, she would see him again.

  10

  THE HOUSE in Wittenau owned by Robert Jerneitzig, the greengrocer, was solidly built, with two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, plus a bathroom which was entered from the outside—and a closed-in terrace. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one large, one small, with a connecting door. Above the bedrooms was an attic. Finally, there was the basement, which had been fitted out as a bomb shelter by Jerneitzig’s tenants, Joseph and Kadi Wirkus, to be used in the event that they did not have time to get to the community shelter a few blocks away.

  Kurt and Hella Riede, the young Jewish couple Jerneitzig had brought to Wittenau on the morning after the massive February 27 roundup of Jews in Berlin, moved into the smaller of the two upstairs bedrooms. To enter and leave their own bedroom the Wirkuses had to pass through the one occupied by the Riedes. Within a few days what at first had seemed awkward became completely natural. The Wirkuses simply didn’t mind the inconvenience and even found it amusing. For their part, the Riedes were quickly convinced that they had stumbled into heaven.

  They could not imagine more generous hosts. From the first the Wirkuses shared their ration cards with the Riedes without asking for recompense. The Riedes, who had managed to guard several thousand marks they had been given by their parents, contributed whatever the Wirkuses would accept. There was no problem with food. Kadi could get whatever she needed from her parents’ farm in Pomerania to supplement the food they got with their ration cards.

  There was a coziness to the house, due in part to the small scale of the rooms but much more to the outgoing nature of the Wirkuses. In the evenings especially, when Beppo—as Joseph Wirkus was known—was home from work, the air was filled with conversation as the couples made their first tentative appraisals of one another. The chemistry between them remained as remarkable in their first week together as it had in their first moments. The special and dangerous circumstances in which they found themselves seemed to augment and compress their responses, so that they quickly progressed to the kind of feelings that in normal times might have taken them months to approach. The men, who looked so much alike, actually began to act like brothers. Kadi, so quick to respond to people she liked, took to Hella as a sister. There were no arguments; although Kurt was still on edge from his abrupt flight, he was an easygoing man at heart and tried hard to be agreeable. Hella was even more accommodating; she was a quiet person, comfortable to be with. When Kadi went shopping Hella minded the baby, Wilfried. It quickly began to seem to Kadi that she was leaving Wilfried with his aunt. For her part, Hella felt like the child’s second mother.

  But what the Riedes received from the Wirkuses was far more important than food and shelter and the confirmation of friendship. It was the knowledge that there were German Gentiles who cared for them to the point of risking their lives.

  A week after the Riedes moved in, Beppo conceived an audacious plan to obtain a fake identification card for Kurt. The plan hung on the uncanny resemblance between them. They had the same coloring and facial contours, and both of them wore heavy glasses. The plan was to obtain a postal identification card using Beppo’s name and address and Kurt’s photograph. As I.D. cards went, a postal card wasn’t much; it was issued by the post office as a means of identifying recipients of money orders and registered mail. But to a Jew with no papers whatever save those that marked him as a Jew, a postal I.D. card might one day be a passport to life.

  Beppo was well known at the post office because he supervised all correspondence in his division. He also had a fair idea of who at the post office would work according to the book and who would be more casual. He chose his mark with care, a quiet-mannered clerk in his fifties with whom he had had frequent dealings.

  As accustomed as he was to doing business with the clerk, however, Beppo could not quiet his nerves as he approached him on February 12. His hands were damp and shaking ever so slightly, and his armpits felt wet. “I’ve lost my postal I.D.,” he said in a voice he fought to control.

  “Das macht nichts,” the clerk said with a small, reassuring smile.

  Beppo gave his name, address and date of birth as the clerk typed out a new card.

  “Picture?” the clerk said.

  Beppo handed him Kurt Riede’s picture. What Beppo had prayed would happen did happen. The clerk scarcely glanced at it. He simply affixed it to the identity card, stamped the card and handed it to Beppo without comment.

  When Beppo got home that evening he said to Kurt as casually as he could. “Here’s your I.D. card.” Kurt took the card and stared at it. Then, unable to speak, he laughed.

  Next came the problem of an identity card for Hella Riede. They solved this problem in a manner that was only slightly less audacious—and every bit as dangerous.

  Kadi—short for Leokadia—Wirkus had an old pregnancy priority card she had been issued by the Amt für Volkswohlfahrt, the Bureau of Social Welfare, on May 6, 1942. The card had permitted her to get priority service in stores and to go to the head of lines. Carefully Beppo steamed off the old photograph of Kadi and put a photo of Hella in its place. Had the official stamp been on Kadi’s photograph they could not have managed, but luckily the stamp was on the card.
r />   So now the Wirkuses’ chances of exposure had multiplied, as had the risk of imprisonment and death, but in sheltering the Riedes and providing them with false identities, it seemed to Beppo and Kadi that they were giving their own small answer to the Nazis. It was an answer they had long wanted to give, because they believed that life for Catholics in Germany would eventually be as bad as it currently was for the Jews. Their information was fourth-hand—a friend of theirs had heard it from a friend of hers, who had heard it from a priest—but they believed it nonetheless. The priest was said to be well connected to one of the ministries; he had photocopies of official documents that described what was in store for both Jews and Catholics. The Jews were to be exterminated, and Catholicism was to be abolished. There was to be no more Communion. Baptism would be replaced with a Hitler Youth ceremony. Churches were to be preserved, but religious services would be banned. Instead of Sunday worship, there would be Saturday readings of Mein Kampf, complete with interpretations by the readers followed by group discussions.

  The rumors that the Wirkuses had set store by might not have been accurate in their specifics, but they were solidly undergirded by fact. Catholics had always been a minority in Protestant Germany, often an uncomfortable one, but the period since the assumption of power by the Nazis in January 1933 had been particularly difficult. At first the Nazis had seemed to reinforce the position of all Christian denominations by making religious education in the schools mandatory. But as the party consolidated its power it began to phase religion out of the schools, first by eliminating the subject from graduation examinations, then by making attendance at school prayers optional, finally by scheduling religious classes at the beginning or the end of the morning, so that students who wished to cut those classes might more easily do so. In Bavaria, a region heavily populated by Catholics, the party mounted an effective propaganda campaign against Church schools, a great majority of which were soon converted to interdenominational schools.

  Among storm troopers, Hitler’s vanguard of roughnecks, who had frightened and beaten his opponents into submission, anti-Catholicism was so pervasive that it seemed at times to be almost as fervid as anti-Semitism. “Storm trooper comrades,” they sang in one popular song, “hang the Jews and put the priests against the wall.” This same scathing bias was displayed in a 1934 Hitler Youth song: “No evil priest can prevent us from feeling that we are the children of Hitler / We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel / Away with incense and holy water / The Church can go hang for all we care.” By 1936, Church leaders were warning parents to try to counteract the anti-Catholic biases their children might find among the Hitler Youth, particularly its leaders. In that year the party began a smear campaign against monks and nuns, dragging hundreds of them to court on charges impugning their morality; and by 1939 the party’s anti-Catholic biases had matured into an all-out Church Secession Campaign, which managed to persuade hundreds of thousands of Catholics, many of them civil servants and party members, to renounce their faith. After the war began, the party banned radio transmissions of religious broadcasts, seized church bells for scrap and, pleading shortage of newsprint, shut down the Catholic press.

  The Church’s ambivalent response to the Nazis had scarcely given such Catholics as Beppo and Kadi guidance. Certainly it opposed all measures designed to weaken its authority, but in many ways and on many occasions the Church acted as though it was trying to find a way to live with the Nazis. It professed its patriotism at all turns and its concurrence with Nazi policy wherever the interests and attitudes of Church and State coincided. The Church was at one with the Nazis in their opposition to communism and its manifest atheism. With regard to the Nazis’ official policy of anti-Semitism, the Church’s position was less formally stated. Individual priests, some of high rank, expressed their agreement that Jews had for too long exercised too great an influence on German life, thereby lending support to the Nazis’ economic persecutions of the Jews. While no priests openly supported the physical persecutions that subsequently transpired, almost none of them voiced objections. The truth was that anti-Semitism pervaded Germany’s Catholic Church—a fact that neither Beppo nor Kadi liked to think about. Beppo had once lived with a Jewish family; Kadi had dealt with Jewish merchants; Their memories were good ones. In their opinion, any German Catholic who did not see in the experience of the Jews a portent of the fate of Catholics was not seeing clearly. And if the story the Riedes unfolded as they sat in the kitchen after dinner each evening was any indication, their own worst fears were justified.

  Their troubles with the Gestapo, the Riedes said, had begun in 1938. Prior to then, life had been difficult but not impossible. Kurt had grown up in Stendal, a pleasant community near the Elbe River, seventy miles west of Berlin. His father had died when he was very young, and he had lived with his mother in her parents’ home. When Hitler came to power, all of his classmates joined the Hitler Youth. “We’re not after you,” one of them reassured Kurt. “You’re a German Jew. It’s those Jews who came to Germany from the East. They’ve got to get out.” What small comfort Kurt took from the solicitude of his friends was quickly dissipated. He had wanted to study dentistry, but when his time to matriculate came, neither he nor the two other Jews in his class were permitted to take the Abitur, the examination that qualified them for entrance to a university. And so Kurt had moved to Brandenburg, just outside Berlin, to become an apprentice at the department store of Konitzer & Sons. There he joined the Maccabees, an organization of young Jews preparing themselves for emigration to Palestine, a prospect whose popularity had soared even among previously assimilationist German Jews after the advent of Hitler. One of the young Maccabees was Hella.

  Kurt quickly became a force in the Maccabees, and just as quickly won Hella’s heart. She was not quite eighteen—five years his junior. To her he seemed a natural leader, completely absorbed in the affairs of the group. He made frequent trips to the Palestine office in Berlin, coordinating the group’s studies with requirements for emigration and trying to arrange commitments for passage. The commitments never came, but Kurt tried his best to keep up the spirits of his colleagues.

  By 1938, however, that had become an almost hopeless task. Not only was passage not forthcoming but the situation at home was deteriorating. It was a time when the smaller cities and towns of Germany seemed to be vying with one another for the distinction of being first to be Judenfrei, or free of Jews. Often on their own, without benefit of enabling edicts from Berlin, the local governments enacted measures designed to make Jewish residents increasingly uncomfortable. Public facilities were put off limits. Jews were tried by people’s courts for violation of regulations imposed by such quasi-legal bodies as chambers of commerce or boards of trade. Jews arrested for traffic violations, real or imaginary, soon found themselves in concentration camps. But the worst pressures were economic. It was a time when Jews throughout Germany were being forced to abandon their businesses. Sometimes money was exchanged, but in amounts so small in relation to value that even in these instances the takeovers, usually by favored party members, amounted to outright confiscation. Hella’s parents—her father, a Christian, had converted to Judaism—had owned a linens shop, but the store was suddenly seized. In the process they also lost their living quarters, which had been attached to the shop. To compound their misfortunes, Konitzer & Sons was taken over by non-Jews, and Kurt was suddenly out of a job.

  Despite their misfortunes, Kurt and Hella went ahead with their wedding plans. On October 25 they were married and went off on a brief honeymoon. One morning after they returned to Brandenburg, Kurt took an early train to Berlin on Maccabee business. It was November 10. The newspapers were filled with accounts of the shooting in Paris of Ernst vom Rath, the young German diplomat, by the Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. As he walked the streets of Berlin, Kurt cautiously studied the faces of the people he passed. Were they studying him? Were they marking him as a Jew? Kurt’s features were hard to type; other Jews might identify him at once as
a Jew, but the fact wouldn’t automatically register on Gentiles. Seeing the Berliners clustered at newsstands, many of them shaking their heads, Kurt wondered whether his safety in the next days would depend on his ability to pass as an “Aryan.”

  As he walked apprehensively to Unter den Linden he saw young men brandishing clubs and racing to the boulevard. One of them looked his way, and for a moment Kurt felt his heart had stopped. “Come on,” the young man said then, “we’re going to break the windows of the Jew shops.”

  Kurt pointed to his suit. “I’m not dressed for that kind of thing. I’m on official business. You go on.”

  The young man ran off. Kurt went to Kranzler’s cafe, ordered a cup of coffee and tried to calm down. At three that afternoon he returned to Brandenburg, where his worst fears were confirmed. Hella, who had been waiting anxiously for him, rushed from her parents’ new quarters and led him down the street. “You can’t come in,” she said. “The Gestapo’s been here four times already to get you.” She told him that dozens of Jews from Brandenburg had already been arrested and were being transported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

  While Kurt waited on the street for Hella, nervously watching for the Gestapo, she packed a bag. They left at once for Hannover, to stay with an aunt of Kurt’s who had married a non-Jew. A few days later Kurt’s mother informed them that his stepfather had been picked up by the Gestapo, along with other Jews from Stendal, and taken to Sachsenhausen.

  Kurt and Hella remained in Hannover until January 1939, when they went back to Stendal and moved in with his mother’s parents. Without work, all but bereft of hope, Kurt set to the task of trying to emigrate. His application for Palestine had been turned down because of his poor eyesight. He tried the United States, but the U.S. wanted affidavits that guaranteed financial support. By that time Hella had relatives in America, but the U.S. immigration quotas meant a delay of three or four years.