The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  Berlin was to be leveled by bombs.

  Bombs were not new to Berlin. The city had been bombed for the first time exactly three years earlier by the British, in retaliation for a Luftwaffe raid on London. Raids, some of them significant in size, had continued with increasing frequency since then. But the bombing that began in mid-August 1943 was of a scope and intensity such as the city had never experienced before.

  Suddenly it was very hard to be gay, even though both young couples welcomed the attacks. The Riedes would now face a new danger. They could not go to the public bomb shelter, where patrols of the Wehrmacht might ask to see their papers. They would have to sit out the raids in the basement of the Wirkuses’ home, where a direct hit could either kill them outright or bury them alive.

  17

  TO THE NON-JEWISH residents of Berlin the bombs that began to fall upon them with such methodical rhythm and pulverizing force were more than portents of massive destruction and prospective injury or death. They were the explosion of the myth of German invincibility that had been so assiduously cultivated by the Nazis. Hermann Goering had boasted at the outset of the war that if enemy planes ever broke through the antiaircraft defenses around Berlin, his name would be “Meier.” Now as the Germans sat in their air raid shelters listening to the roar of the approaching bombers, the screech of plummeting bombs, the booming concussions and the crash of falling buildings overhead, they whispered little jokes to one another about “Reichsmarschall Meier.” They no longer believed the stories they were being told about the progress of the war in general, because the accounts in the newspapers and on the radio no longer accorded with their own perception of reality.

  That reality, each day that they survived, was the certainty that there would be another raid the next day in which some bomber might be carrying a bomb destined for them. It was the possibility, after they had left the shelters in the wake of the all-clear signals, that they would find their homes destroyed and be forced to join the growing ranks of Berliners without a place to live or possessions of any kind. Each night they walked through streets clotted with fallen trees and masses of rubble. If there was a wind, the soot and ashes from hundreds of fires blew into their eyes. Fire engines, their sirens screaming, picked their way through the rubble, trying, often failing, to reach the worst conflagrations. Ambulances carrying the wounded careened through the passable streets, en route to hospitals. Each morning silence covered the city, as thick as the smoke still rising from the smoldering buildings.

  For the few thousand Jews still hidden in Berlin, playing cat and mouse with the Gestapo, the air raids of the Allies meant all of this and more. For them the danger was greater, because they couldn’t go to the shelters. A direct hit on their sanctuaries would be a calamity beyond the understanding of even the Berliners whose homes had been destroyed. But as great as the danger was, and as frightful as the raids were, the Jews rejoiced at the prospect of deliverance heralded by the bombs.

  On an August night when the British bombers filled the sky in numbers such as Berlin had never before experienced, young Hans Rosenthal stepped cautiously and quietly from his hiding place for the first time in the six months since his grandmother had brought him to the house of Frau Jauch. Although he knew that the war was far from over, he could not help but believe that he had just been reprieved from a sentence of lifetime imprisonment.

  Hans looked to his left and then to his right. There was not another human being in sight. Of course not; they had all taken shelter. He walked carefully out into the garden, his steps as tentative as those of a convalescent after a prolonged illness. His heart was beating so hard that he was afraid someone might hear it.

  Only when he reached the little fruit trees twenty feet from the tool shed that had been his sanctuary since the previous March did Hans dare to look up. It was a clear night—the bombers seldom came in bad weather. If he looked away from the city he could see the stars. Turning, he could watch the searchlights crisscrossing the sky in their frantic search for the bombers.

  He could hear the bombers’ thunder and then see their flares. First came the lead plane, which set flares at four different points to mark the quadrangular target zone. And then came the squadrons. Their incendiary bombs lit up the city, sending the reflection skyward. Hans could see the bombs falling and, moments later, hear the dull thuds as they hit. Flak howled from the woods. Fighter planes covered the bombers, watching for Messerschmitts. Occasionally there would be a dogfight. Each time a Messerschmitt fell, Hans had to swallow a cheer.

  He had no fear of the planes. They were his allies.

  Every night that the bombers came Hans went outside to watch. Each raid was a turning point. It told him the Allies were still functioning.

  He felt absolutely relaxed, because he knew the Gestapo wouldn’t come. He stood next to the little fruit trees and prayed for each Allied pilot to stay in the sky.

  For the Fritz Croners, as for Hans Rosenthal, the bombings had been a turning point—which had come none too soon. Since early February, seven months before, their lives had been haunted by the memory of Fritz’s parents and their deportation to the camps. There had not been a word from them since then. God only knew what had happened to them; Fritz and Marlitt feared the worst and hoped for the best.

  Their own lives had been filled with unremitting tension. The proceeds from Fritz’s jewelry trade had been good enough to pay the exorbitant rents and black market food bills, all the higher now that Lane, who had rejoined them in March, following her two months with the woman who cared for her in Neukölln, was no longer an infant. But since then the strain on their resources had increased greatly because they had assumed responsibility for another underground Jewish family.

  The family’s name was Lissner. They had a tiny baby. Neither the father nor the mother dared go into the street because their features and coloring were so untypically German. Their plight had been brought to Fritz’s attention by Joseph Drexel, a Catholic friend and business associate of Fritz’s who for years had been president of the Berlin goldsmiths’ association. Dr. Lissner had been his dentist. Drexel, a kind-looking man with a round face and soft eyes, told Fritz he had been caring for the Lissner family for some time but was unable to support them any longer. Could Fritz help?

  Drexel had once said to Fritz, “If you need me, night or day, you come.” His apartment was the Croners’ last refuge if and when they needed it. Thus far they had managed without it, but Fritz felt a tremendous debt to Drexel for his offer. Now Fritz took Drexel’s hand. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

  Twice a week since then, every Tuesday and Friday, Marlitt had shopped for the Lissners and delivered food to the little flat where they were in hiding. She would knock on the door of a friendly neighbor, who would make certain all was clear. She always brought milk for the baby.

  Each morning Marlitt would leave the Croners’ hiding place to purchase food. They had no ration cards of course, so her shopping place was wherever the black market could be found. Fritz would be told by his jeweler associates where the dealers were. As she would leave she would say, “I’ll be home about twelve.” But twelve o’clock would come and she would not return; one o’clock, two o’clock, sometimes three o’clock would pass. Fritz would be so frightened he would be unable to work. His greatest fear was that Marlitt would be challenged by an S.S. patrol and be unable to produce a paper. But Marlitt always returned.

  One summer day she came in badly shaken. She had gone to the Lissners and knocked on the neighbor’s door. It had opened quickly. “The Gestapo is here,” the neighbor whispered. Without a word Marlitt had turned and walked away, forcing herself not to run.

  Both she and Fritz knew that they were using up their ration of luck. And how long could their nerves take the strain?

  And then came the massive raid on the night of July 28–29, 1943, when 800 to 1,000 English bombers attacked Hamburg, Germany’s second city. Although it was a hundred fifty miles away from Berlin, the r
aid would profoundly change the Croners’ lives.

  In his diary Joseph Goebbels wrote of “a catastrophe the extent of which simply staggers the imagination. A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history. We are faced with problems that are almost impossible of solution. Food must be found for this population of a million. They must be given clothing. In short, we are facing problems there of which we had no conception even a few weeks ago … 800,000 homeless people … are wandering up and down the streets not knowing what to do.”

  For the Croners, as for many other Jews, the key hit came during a raid a few weeks later when a bomb demolished the building that housed all of Hamburg’s official records. A few days after the attack an old acquaintance of Fritz’s, like himself an illegal Jew, approached him on the street. It flashed through Fritz’s mind that the man might be a catcher, and for an instant he thought of fleeing. But the man, who was many years Fritz’s senior, quickly reassured him. He was, he said, supporting himself by arranging black market papers. Would Fritz be interested in some? He could arrange it, he went on, for 5,000 marks. He had contact with someone in Hamburg who could obtain the official departure papers residents needed to move from the city. Since there were no longer any records for the officials to check, you could give a false name, place and date of birth, and tell the authorities that you had lived in a part of the city that had been destroyed and wished to visit elsewhere for several weeks. But the destination given would not be Berlin. That was the key. The Gestapo, knowing that records in Hamburg had been destroyed, was on the lookout for false papers from that city. What he would do, the old man said, was obtain departure papers for an intermediate city, one that had not been touched by the bombings. A few weeks later the papers from Hamburg to the intermediate city would be converted into departure papers from the intermediate city to Berlin. The police would be unlikely to suspect papers from a city that had not been hit by bombs.

  For Fritz himself such papers were out of the question, because at his age he should have been in the army and civilian papers would do no good. But for Marlitt and Lane such papers would be a godsend.

  Fritz agreed to the plan. Several weeks later the old man showed up with departure papers authorizing a move from Braunschweig to Berlin for a Vera Krauser, born in Lenz, and her daughter, Helena. The papers were exquisitely official.

  To add to their good fortune, the Croners found a new sanctuary—two rooms in a seven-room apartment at Bayerische Strasse 5. It was an incongruously quiet residential street, with cobbled walks and stately trees and gaslights on slender poles, only a few hundred yards from the Olivaer Platz and the Kurfürstendamm. Fritz installed Marlitt and Lane there as the Krausers, mother and daughter. He continued to live in the store in Halensee, but the separation from Marlitt wasn’t so painful, because the two dwellings were only a mile apart and he could make frequent visits.

  For the first time since going underground nine months before, Fritz was beginning to believe they might survive.

  18

  FOR HANS HIRSCHEL, confined since February 1942 to the Wilmersdorf store-turned-apartment of Countess Maria von Maltzan, the devastating new air raids were only the latest in a series of events that had radically altered his life.

  He was still living with Marushka, but his long stretches of loneliness were now being broken up by a parade of Jewish illegals who had begun to pass through the flat on the Detmolder Strasse. How they had come to find Marushka, Hans didn’t quite understand, and by now he knew better than to ask; but he also knew, to his immense delight, that his bouts of solitude were over. Every second or third evening there would be a knock on the door and it would be an illegal looking for a place to spend a few nights. The illegals always felt safer when they could move from place to place, so that their trail would never stay warm. “Can I stay with you Wednesday and Thursday?” one of them might say. “I’ve got someone lined up for Friday and Saturday.”

  One such itinerant was a carpet dealer in his fifties, with an appearance that Marushka sadly concluded resembled the anti-Semitic caricatures in Der Stürmer. He had a prominent nose and thick lips. Marushka considered it nothing less than a miracle that the man had not already been picked up, particularly since he was defensive about his appearance and wore the look of a hunted man. “Look here,” she said to him one day, “you’ve simply got to take the offensive. What you should say to people is, ‘Stop that staring! I know what you’re thinking. Every three days somebody looks at me and says, “You’re Jewish,” and I’m just fed up with it.’” She also impressed on him that he must always do what others were doing. “The worst thing you can do is go into a Stube, where every German is ordering sausage and beer, and order cake and coffee.”

  But it was in a semipermanent resident named Hollander that Hans took the most delight. They had met in 1938, after Hans had lost his job and was being retrained as a metallurgist. Hollander was in the same class. They were approximately the same age, and while Hollander did not have Hans’s intellectual gifts, he was nonetheless an intelligent and spirited man. Hans’s one concern was that Hollander might be too spirited; he insisted on going out at some point each day to visit his mistress, a practice that Hans feared might jeopardize Marushka’s safety, his own, and the safety of the other Jews sheltered in the flat.

  But Hans said nothing for the moment, because he too had begun to leave the flat from time to time—an adventure made possible by yet another spectacular change in his life. With Marushka’s help he had acquired an impressive piece of identity that could pass most normal checks.

  Even though her sentiments were suspect, Marushka was still a countess and still immensely popular among Berlin’s elite. Consequently she was often invited to dinner parties, and she almost always accepted—first, because it meant a good meal and, second, because she might pick up some valuable information. It was at one such party, given by the Ministry of Administration, that she had met Werner Keller, a tall, blond, good-looking man of thirty-two who had been a writer in civilian life and, after a brief career as a pilot, had gone to work for Albert Speer’s Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Keller’s look struck Marushka as both studious and thoughtful, which made his association with Speer seem incongruous.

  Keller, as it turned out, was no Nazi. “I’d love to have a real conversation with you,” he said after they had been introduced by a mutual friend. “We can’t do that here.” Marushka sensed that his interest wasn’t romantic. She knew that Keller was married, and had sent his wife and children to their country home on the Elbe for their safety. Anti-Nazis, she believed, had a way of gravitating toward one another. When Keller telephoned her a few days after the dinner party, she remarked that she couldn’t quite understand how he could be working where he was. It was an observation that could have meant a dozen things, but Keller knew what she was saying. “It’s a very good place to be,” he said. “You can help a lot of people.” Another ambiguous statement—but now they both understood each other.

  When she was certain she knew him well enough, Marushka invited Keller to the flat to meet Hans. It was at the end of Hans’s longest period of isolation, and he was overjoyed to have a visitor. When he found out that Keller was a writer, Hans was beside himself. The two men talked for hours. Afterward Marushka said with great care, “Werner, what do you think the chances would be of getting some papers for Hans?”

  “I think that could be arranged,” Keller said after a silence that to Hans had seemed like an eternity.

  The next time he appeared, Werner brought a paper that identified Hans as an official of the Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Marushka attached a photograph of Hans to the document, photograph and document were duly stamped, and Hans suddenly had a new identity. By way of celebration, Marushka took him out to Keller’s country house late the following Saturday morning, and fetched him early Monday morning. She was willing to risk the trip with Hans’s new document, but she did not quite trust hi
m to brazen his way alone out of a tight spot if he should find himself in one.

  A year had passed since Hans had moved into the flat. Marushka’s thirty-fourth birthday, on March 25, 1943, was approaching. To Hans’s astonishment she proposed that they have a party, and set about arranging it. Her guest list of twenty friends, most of whom knew about Hans, included an actor from Vienna, a girlhood friend, a writer and his wife, and two exquisite Jewish women, Maria Etlinger and Annchen Foss, who were also living illegally. But others would be coming who did not knows Hans—several young officers attached to the veterinary school where Marushka had been trained, and an army major named Von Borker, who had been flirting with Marushka for months now and pestering her to invite him to her house. Borker insisted that they had many mutual friends and that they might even be related by marriage. Marushka considered Borker such a fool that he wouldn’t recognize a Jew when he saw one. She was sure that Hans could easily carry off a masquerade. He would pretend that he was “Professor Schoeler”—just as he had done when he had prepped her fellow students for their exams—with a chair in economics at the university. There was a certain risk involved, but there was a risk if she didn’t dispose of Borker somehow; he might begin to disbelieve her story that she lived alone. Besides, he was on the verge of obtaining a Mauser pistol for her, because, she had told him, she felt unsafe living by herself. She very much wanted that pistol.

  The party began at six o’clock. Marushka had collected a quantity of food from her black market sources as well as from peasants whose livestock she castrated. There was a greater variety of food, and in greater abundance, than the guests had seen in a long time—meats, sausages, cheese from France, dishes made with eggs. Marushka, carefully made up and wearing a brown dress, looked exceedingly feminine and beguiling. For her as well as for the others the party was a great release, and she proposed to make the most of it. There were many toasts, drunk with wine and schnapps. By the time Major von Borker arrived, the party was in high gear. He was astonished by the crowd—Marushka hadn’t told him it was her birthday—and upset that he hadn’t brought flowers.