The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  For weeks the isolation continued. One day, at last, Willy opened the door a crack. Outside the sun was shining. He crept out and walked around the property. The next day he repeated the excursion, and the day after that, each time venturing a little farther from the house. With success came boldness. One day he went out the garden gate and walked for twenty-five minutes until he was in the small village of Müggelheim. There he sat in a cafe and drank a cup of coffee. The next day he walked to Müggelheim and took a bus to Köpenick, a suburb-size community. Finally the day came when he ventured into Berlin itself. It was foolish, and he knew it, but he preferred the risk to the isolation.

  His greatest fear was being caught in an air raid and having to go a shelter. Berlin was like a ghost town during air raids. Everyone was required to be off the streets; there was no vehicular traffic. It was the best of all times for the police patrols to tour the shelters in their constant search for criminals, deserters and underground Jews. Thus far, however, his luck had held; he hadn’t been caught in a raid, no one had questioned him, and he was beginning to believe divine Providence was guarding him.

  And then one day, just as the weather was warming up and the cottage was beginning to seem hospitable, Meier came to tell Willy that it was time for him to leave. The neighbors would be coming soon to use their country homes, and there was no way that he could be explained, particularly since many of them had known him from another time and knew that he was Jewish.

  It was a bitter moment for Willy Glaser, but since he had already survived for three months as an illegal, he couldn’t help but believe that he could survive still longer. All he needed was another place to go.

  The trouble was that there was no other place to go.

  12

  THE QUESTION of what to do with the orphan Hans Rosenthal when he suddenly reappeared in Berlin in March 1943 was not long in being answered. His Grandmother Agnes, to whom he appealed for help, found a refuge for him with a woman named Jauch, a small, delicate, middle-aged spinster who ran a tiny dress shop in a workers’ neighborhood called Lichtenberg, on the east side of Berlin. She had bought dresses from Hans’s mother. The dresses came originally from Frau Rosenthal’s Christian aunt, a sister of Grandmother Agnes, who had a big job in a department store and always had extra dresses made when she ordered, so that she could give some to her niece for resale.

  Frau Jauch’s sole activity when she wasn’t selling dresses was studying the Bible. The Bible, she said, had prophesied the evil incarnation of Hitler. The Bible also told her that the war would end in July of 1944, fourteen months hence. She lived in a tiny cottage behind her store in a neighborhood of cottages that had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. Her cottage consisted of a combination bedroom-sitting room, a kitchen, and a five-by-six-foot shed beyond the kitchen. It was in this tiny annex that Hans had been living since his grandmother had brought him to Frau Jauch in March. Frau Jauch, who had mourned the passing of Hans’s mother, had agreed at once to hide him.

  His room contained a couch, a small table and a chair. It had no heat. The only time he was warm was in the evening, when Frau Jauch would pull aside the drapery that covered the door, open the door and let Hans out. It was then that she would also empty the chamber pot Hans had used during the day. He never went outside. He had remained indoors for three months.

  Frau Jauch would give Hans portions of the Bible and the Psalms to read. She tried to persuade him that the Jews were the chosen people, an idea he found uncomfortable; all people, he believed, were equal.

  When they spoke, which was rarely, they did so in the barest whispers, leaning next to each other’s ears. But mostly they communicated by signs, because Frau Jauch was supposed to be living alone, and a passerby might become suspicious if he heard voices. They would eat their meals together in silence in the kitchen. Afterward they would remain together either in the kitchen or the sitting-bedroom, because two lamps for one person in a frugal neighborhood would make the neighbors wonder.

  Hans kept Frau Jauch’s sales records for her, which she needed to obtain new merchandise. It was a small enough way to show his gratitude. Not only was she hiding him and emptying his chamber pot without complaint, she was also sharing her ration cards with him. Frau Jauch had two hens, which gave them a small supply of eggs, and she kept rabbits, which she insisted Hans learn to kill. “If you don’t,” she said in response to his initial squeamishness, “we won’t have food to live on.” She would bring a rabbit to his room, and Hans would kill it there, then cut it open and dress it.

  Three antifascist families in the neighborhood knew about Hans and brought Frau Jauch extra supplies of food. His grandmother also came from time to time with provisions. He never asked her about the family. He did not want to know about anyone, lest he be captured and tortured into revealing their whereabouts. Similarly, he prayed that his grandmother wouldn’t talk to the others about him.

  Every morning Frau Jauch brought Hans a copy of the Morgenpost, and he would read every word—a four-hour task—even though he was certain that the paper was filled with propaganda. Frau Jauch had bought him a map; from the dispatches in the newspaper he could mark the location of the fronts. As good a face as the stories tried to put on the battles, it was obvious that the German armies in Russia had either been stalled or actually pushed back. Outright German victories were proclaimed with less and less frequency; when there was one, Hans took it as a personal defeat, an extension of his imprisonment. But German victories meant only that the war would be prolonged; Hans never doubted that the Allies would ultimately win the war, or that he himself would survive.

  He prayed often for his brother, little Gert, who had had polio at the age of two, and whose blood serum, following his complete and rapid recovery, had thereafter been given to other polio victims in the hope that whatever had cured him so quickly might also cure them. (His blood ceased to be “acceptable” after the passage by the Nazis in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws, which set forth the regulations by which the racial purity of “Aryans” was to be protected.) Gert had been ten when he was deported; Hans hadn’t known then about the gas chambers. He prayed now that the rumors he had heard weren’t true. Over and over again he chastised himself for not getting Gert out of that orphanage. Somehow he should have found a way. Again and again Hans prayed that after the war he would be reunited with his brother.

  After the war he would do many things. First he would devote all of his time to finding and killing members of the S.S. The Nazis were murderers. They had started the war. They had killed the Jews. They did not deserve to live. Then he would go to the radio stations and broadcast to the German people, telling them that they must develop tolerance, that Jews were like other people. He would not leave Germany. He would stay and educate young Germans to democracy. He hated the Nazis. He could not hate the Germans. Right now a German woman was hiding him, feeding him, saving his life.

  He could not understand the hatred of race. He spent hours wondering what was behind it, and other hours praying for the end of the war.

  He slept lightly now. At the sound of footsteps he would awaken at once and grasp the knife he kept in his room. He quickly learned to distinguish between the footsteps of his neighbors and the jackboots of the Nazis.

  13

  SINCE THE MORNING after he had gone underground, early in December 1942, Fritz Croner, the resilient jeweler, had scoured the city for a sanctuary for himself, Marlitt and the baby, Lane, to replace the one he would have to give up on January 1. When the last days of December arrived and he had still found nothing, he felt that he had touched bottom. Perhaps, he told himself one morning, the time really had come for him and Marlitt to place Lane with a friendly German woman and surrender to the Gestapo.

  And then that very morning the miracle happened.

  Two hours later Fritz burst into their barren flat and took Marlitt into his arms. “I found a place!” he said.

  She sagged against him. “Thank God!”

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nbsp; Quickly he told her the details. The “place” was not a flat but a store. He had rented it from a real estate agent, a non-Jew married to a Jewish woman. The agent knew that he and Marlitt were Jewish, but it didn’t matter, because he didn’t have to register them with the police. Only residents of apartments had to be registered. There was no registration requirement for those who rented stores, inasmuch as no one, presumably, lived in them.

  The store was in Halensee, just beyond the western terminus of the Kurfürstendamm. The Croners moved in on January 1, 1943. There was only one bed, and a mattress for Lane, but its very improbability as a dwelling gave them added reassurance. Within a few days Fritz was able to secure a Telefunken radio, complete with short wave, and that brightened their lives even more.

  Fritz told the caretaker of the building that he was an engineer stationed in Poland, and that his work brought him frequently back to Berlin. The caretaker accepted the story. But Fritz became restless. One hiding place didn’t seem enough to him. He thought they needed two or three. They would be far safer if they could move around.

  In late January he found a room in an apartment on the Mörchinger Strasse in Zehlendorf. He rented it under the name of Fritz Kramer. The woman from whom he sublet the room was paying 150 marks a month rent for the entire apartment; for his room—which he told her he planned to use only two or three days a week—she charged him 600 marks a month, even though she would rent the room to others when he wasn’t there. Fritz didn’t complain. When she asked him for his police registration, he told her that because he was in Berlin only a few days a week on business he wasn’t required to have one. Had she believed his story, or had she reported him to the police? He couldn’t know. He could only hope that she liked his rent enough to accept whatever risk was involved for herself in failing to report him.

  Fritz and Marlitt agreed that it would be impossible to take Lane with them when they used the apartment in Zehlendorf. Someone would demand to know what a baby was doing with an itinerant merchant and his wife in a furnished room in Berlin. Why did not the mother and child remain at home? Where was home? And where were the papers to prove it? They still had no papers—and no convincing story for anyone more demanding than the landlady. And so they placed Lane with an old woman in Neukölln who had been recommended by others. Three times a week, Marlitt would go to Neukölln with food for the child. In addition they paid the woman 300 marks a month.

  With Lane in safekeeping, and with two hiding places, Fritz was beginning to feel, if not secure, at least a little more comfortable.

  And then, on February 4, 1943, Fritz Croner went to visit his parents at their apartment, only to learn that the event he had expected and dreaded since his own flight into illegality two months before had finally come to pass. That day the elder Croners had received an order to remain in their flat. They all knew what that meant: deportation. But no one had come. “Maybe tomorrow,” Willy Croner said.

  It was difficult for Fritz to look at his father. How proud a German he had once been. He had fought for his country and been crippled in its behalf; a wound suffered in the battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia, fighting against the Russians, had permanently disabled his right knee. He had received a medal for heroism. When the Nazis came to power, Jews from the nearby villages came to him and asked, “What are you going to do? Are you going to leave?”

  “Leave Germany?” Willy Croner scoffed. “What for? I have my Iron Cross.” Surely, Willy Croner believed, a man who had risked his life for the fatherland had nothing to fear.

  Now, ten years later, the truth had worked like acid on Willy Croner’s face, washing it of all illusion as well as the slightest sign of hope. It had been months since he had smiled. The pain that he wore so visibly worked doubly on Fritz. There was the empathy he felt for his father’s suffering. There was also the devastating argument it raised against Fritz’s own iron determination to survive.

  The time came to say goodbye. Fritz embraced his mother. It registered on him that even in this moment she was being a predictable Jewish mother, making it easier for him by not crying. Then he turned to his father. They shook hands and then clasped each other. Fritz left the apartment sick with the knowledge that, in all probability, he would never see his parents again.

  A week later he called the Jewish community headquarters. “What’s with the Croners?” he asked.

  “They were picked up February fifth,” a voice on the other end said.

  A few days later Fritz went to the apartment of his parents’ neighbor, where Willy Croner had left a trunk with their papers, the papers that proved he had owned valuable property he had been forced to sell for a pittance. Fritz remembered the details of that humiliation all too clearly. One day in February 1938 Fritz was in Berlin on business when he received a frantic phone call from his father. “Come fast,” he had said, “I’m in trouble with the Gestapo.” When Fritz returned to Deutsch-Krone his father told him that he was being pressured by the Gestapo to sell his store and house and move to Berlin. The Gestapo said it had a buyer, but it wouldn’t reveal the buyer’s name or tell Willy Croner the price. Each day Willy was compelled to report to Gestapo headquarters, where he was made to stand for an hour and receive a barrage of insults, along with demands that he agree to sell out.

  Several days passed, with the same routine. Then the Gestapo learned that Fritz was in Deutsch-Krone and ordered him to accompany his father. Finally Willy was excused because of his war injury, and Fritz was made to bear the Gestapo’s hazing.

  The Gestapo men in Deutsch-Krone were mostly peasants with little education. They delighted in making Fritz feel like a fool. They would stand him in front of one wall of their fifteen-by-eighteen-foot office, to which had been pinned the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Then they would order him to do one hundred deep-knee bends.

  “It will stop the moment your father says he will sell the shop and the house,” one of them told him. “Be sure and tell your father.”

  Fritz was supposed to arrive for his daily ordeal at 7:00 A.M. One morning he overslept and arrived late without having shaved. Each morning thereafter he was compelled to announce his arrival. “I am the Jew, Croner,” he would call out at the door. “I am clean-shaven.”

  The routine had continued every day for six months. Finally Fritz said to his father, “It’s no use. We have to sell.” Willy agreed. It wasn’t just his son’s ordeal; he knew that the same pressures were being exerted against Jews all over Germany. Inevitably they would be forced to succumb.

  Willy Croner had calculated that if he ever had to sell the store he could get 500,000 Deutschmarks for it. He so informed the Gestapo. To his amazement the Gestapo agreed to the price—but then withheld all but 130,000 marks of the 500,000 paid by the buyer. Willy had been bitter about that to the last. He had worked hard for what he had earned, starting as a youth on a farm, then lugging a pack of textiles on his back through the countryside, selling to the farmers and their wives.

  As he read through his father’s papers Fritz made a vow. After the war he would be recompensed. The papers would help him get back what the Nazis had taken from his father. In his heart Fritz knew he would never be able to decorate his father’s grave; the compensation would be his living memorial to Willy Croner.

  14

  NINE MONTHS had passed since his infant son had died, and in that period Hans Hirschel, the equable intellectual, had not once left the store in Wilmersdorf that Countess Maria von Maltzan, the baby’s mother, had converted into an apartment. He spent the days alone with his memories, not simply of the child’s death, or even of the deportation of his beloved mother to Theresienstadt the previous spring, but of how intoxicating life had been in Berlin before the Nazis came to power. That life was over now, and he was a prisoner, if not of the Nazis directly, at least of the hell they had made.

  In order to maintain his sanity Hans followed a strict routine. Each morning at 6:15 exactly he would rise, draw Marushka’s bath, then awaken her. W
hile Marushka bathed and dressed—usually in pants, because she rode a bicycle to work—Hans would prepare her breakfast as well as a bag lunch of cut-up vegetables that she would take with her to the university, where she was finishing her studies in veterinary medicine. As soon as Marushka had departed Hans would wash the dishes, sweep the floors and tidy up the house. Then he would return to bed and read a book. Sometime after eight he would rise and begin his long ritual of preparing for the day. First he would bathe. Then he would ponder over his choice of clothing: he might wear the same suit and shirt two days in a row, but he always varied his bow ties. Finally he was ready to leave for the day—but of course he would go nowhere.

  He had always been a fastidious man, and the best way to deal with his imprisonment, he had decided, was to retain as much as possible of the manner and appearance of the man he had known himself to be. The one great problem was the beard he had grown to alter his appearance. He loathed it. It did not become him, and it made him feel unkempt.

  When he was dressed Hans would return to his self-appointed task of running the household. It was the least he could do, for Marushka was not only risking her life in his behalf, she was also virtually supporting him. Hans had brought a number of Indian bronzes with him from the apartment he had shared with his mother, which Marushka sold piecemeal from time to time as money was needed. However, the bronzes were not especially valuable and did not bring in enough money to cover expenses. It was Marushka who earned a steady income from her many odd jobs—she was now inspecting slaughterhouses and working for the German equivalent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—and from black market trading. The fact was that Hans was now dependent on Marushka for everything—even his haircuts. Her hairdresser had told her of the many Jews who had been seized while visiting beauty and barber shops. Marushka told him she knew of a Jew in hiding, a man who desperately needed a haircut, and he had taught her how to cut hair.