The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  There was no need to warn the others about Borker because he was wearing his officer’s uniform. Nonetheless there were some anxious looks when Marushka introduced him to “Professor Schoeler.”

  “How are your students these days?” Borker asked stiffly.

  “Very poor,” Hans replied. “All the good students are soldiers.”

  Before Hans could be tested any further Marushka led Borker over to Maria Etlinger and Annchen Foss. “This is the man I was telling you about, with such a wonderful feeling for race,” she said with a smile.

  From that moment on, Borker had eyes only for Annchen Foss, whose striking beauty blinded him to its Sephardic Jewish antecedents. “Have you children?” he asked after a bit.

  “No,” Annchen replied.

  “What a pity,” Borker sighed. “Children of yours would be such a credit to the German nation.”

  Behind Borker, Maria Etlinger leaned back against a wall, closed her eyes and put a hand across her mouth to stifle her helpless laughter.

  An hour later, after voicing his approval of the recent mass deportation of Jews from Berlin, Borker departed. For a moment no one spoke. Then Marushka said, “Come on, everybody, let’s dance.” She put a fox trot on the phonograph and led Hans to the center of the room. All the guests applauded. It was after two when the last guest went home.

  The next time he saw Marushka, Borker gave her the Mauser.

  Six months had passed. The air raids had suddenly and dramatically intensified, a fact of life made all the more vivid for Hans and Marushka because their street, Detmolder Strasse, ran parallel to and fifty yards from an S-Bahn track along which flak trains—flat cars with antiaircraft guns mounted on them—ran during the raids. Their neighborhood got more than its share of bombs, but they welcomed the raids, and neither one of them was frightened, if only because it made no sense to fear something you welcomed. Hans even toyed with the idea of walking the deserted streets during the raids so that he might experience the feeling of absolute assurance that he wouldn’t be detected. Everyone else would be in the air raid shelters.

  He of course could not go to the shelters. His refuge was the cellar beneath their flat. The walls and ceilings of the cellar had been reinforced, and there were storage bins along each side. During the raids the shelter also served as a kennel for the dogs.

  One evening in September, just as the diminishing sound of the planes indicated that a particularly heavy raid had ended, Marushka heard a bomb crash in the street. An instant later an explosion shattered the store window into thousands of pieces and scattered them throughout the flat. Later Hans discovered that tiny particles of glass had been driven through his wardrobe by the force of the explosion and had cut all of his shirts into tatters.

  The explosion had also demolished the front entrance. Early the next morning Marushka foraged for some boards, then nailed them over the space where the window had been, and closed off the front entry as well. Now one could enter and leave the apartment only through the kitchen.

  The pounding of the English bombs continued. Buildings at either side of theirs received direct hits. And then, one day, theirs did too.

  In the cellar Hans thought the world had come to an end. He held the two Scotch terriers in his arms, trying to comfort them. At last the all clear sounded, and he and Marushka went upstairs to have a look at the damage. When they saw it they could only wonder how they were still alive. The explosion had destroyed all of their building, with the exception of their flat and the one above theirs. The ceiling of their living room sagged dangerously and looked as though it could give way at any moment. Marushka went out at once to scavenge for a beam with which to prop it up. By a great stroke of luck she found one, as well as a crew to help her carry it home and install it.

  It was October now, and the weather had turned brisk. Each day Marushka would eye the window frames stacked up outside the store of a glazier down the street. The frames had been brought to him to have the glass replaced. What a lovely supply of fuel, Marushka thought. The next chance she had, she approached the glazier, who she knew was an ardent Nazi, and gave him what he agreed was an inspired idea. He should segregate the frames—those of the good Nazis on the left side of the door, those of the nonparty members on the right. In that way he could attend to the good Nazis first. From that day on, that was how he did it, and from that evening on, Marushka helped herself to the window frames of the party members.

  Marushka was often out in the evenings now, which would have bothered Hans even more than it did if he hadn’t had one or more illegal Jews to keep him company. She never told him in advance that she would be going out, and she never said anything on her return. All he knew for certain was that her departures coincided with those mysterious phone calls: two rings, followed by a minute’s interval, another two rings, another interval, and finally one more ring and a muffled conversation.

  During the fall Marushka was also away from Berlin for several days, visiting one of her sisters in Munich. When she returned to Berlin she was aghast to see Hans waiting on the station platform to meet her. Even though he now had his false identification papers, each sortie was still a risk, and train stations were a special risk because they were so heavily patrolled.

  “Please don’t be angry,” Hans pleaded. “I’ve missed you. I wanted to surprise you. And I just had to get out of the flat.”

  Marushka sighed. “Oh, God,” she said. “Come on.”

  They boarded an S-Bahn train, but before they had gotten very far the bombing started, and passengers and crew abandoned the train for the nearest shelter. “Now we’re in for it,” Marushka muttered as she led a sheepish-looking Hans inside. She pulled Hans off to the darkest corner she could find, and they managed to find floor space in spite of the crowd. The raid went on and on, and as it did, Hans became increasingly fidgety. “Can’t we go over there?” he whispered to Marushka, pointing to a space about thirty feet away that did not seem nearly so crowded.

  “What’s the matter with this space?” Marushka demanded.

  “The crowd over there seems nicer,” Hans said with a laugh, but Marushka figured he was only half kidding. In the center of that space sat a handsome, intelligent-looking man chatting with another man.

  “We’d better stay where we are,” Marushka said. “If we move we’ll only draw attention to ourselves.”

  At last the all clear sounded. As Hans and Marushka rose to leave they happened to notice that as the handsome man across the way rose, the man he had been talking to rose with him. Then they saw why. The men were handcuffed together.

  Hans and Marushka watched in silence as the two men walked away. All the way back to the apartment Hans did not make a comment.

  19

  THE AREA AROUND Wittenau, at the northern fringe of Berlin, was an inviting target for the Allied bombers because of its concentration of factories, supply yards and offices engaged in war production. No bomb had yet fallen near the house of Robert Jerneitzig occupied by the Wirkuses and the Riedes, but the noise of the explosion made the points of impact seem extremely close.

  Night after night the bombers came, their arrival preceded by a period of grace when, warned of the imminent attack by German military broadcasts, residents of the presumed target areas could rush to the community shelters. Joseph Wirkus always took his wife, Kadi, and son, Wilfried, to their neighborhood shelter, five hundred yards away. It took them five minutes to get there, and then he would run back home to sit out the raid in his small basement shelter with Kurt and Hella Riede. He was less safe from the bombs in the basement than he would have been in the shelter, but there was a more important consideration. As illegal Jews the Riedes could not go to the community shelters without risking exposure; his own presence in the basement, Beppo reasoned, would reassure the Riedes—especially Kurt.

  The bombs terrified Kurt. He readily admitted that he was more afraid of them than he was of the Gestapo. It had nothing to do with cowardice; it was the vulnerabil
ity he felt because he was night-blind. Air raids meant dimness, even darkness, which meant, in turn, that he couldn’t see. He felt trapped and helpless in the cellar, and often became so upset that he was forced to risk a trip upstairs, with Hella’s assistance, to go to the bathroom.

  Hella, on the other hand, was so calm that she would often read a novel by candlelight during the raids. Her courage amazed Beppo. “This house will not be hit by a bomb,” she kept assuring them, “No house in which so much good has been done could be hit by a bomb.” To Kurt she would say, softly but emphatically, “We are going to survive.”

  But as the attacks continued without letup, the strain became unbearable. Something had to be done. The more they talked about it, the more clear it became that Kurt would have to leave Berlin, if only for a while, in order to relieve the pressure. There was a perfect place for him to go—the farm in Pomerania owned by Kadi’s parents. But how on earth would they get him there?

  “I have said A, I must now say B,” Beppo told himself again and again, meaning that, having told Kurt he would help him initially, he must now meet his further needs. In his office one day Beppo executed an official leave-of-absence document, a pink piece of paper on which he listed his own name, his occupation, and the dates of his “leave.” Then he gave the document to Kurt, to show to the authorities in case he was stopped on the train en route to the farm. Beppo could only pray that the leave paper, together with Kurt’s fake postal identity, would be enough for the authorities. If the authorities became suspicious and checked back with Beppo’s office, he knew that he was finished.

  To minimize the risk of detection, the trip was scheduled for a time on the weekend when Beppo’s office would be closed. Should the police request his military papers, Kurt could say that they were locked in his office for safekeeping. There would be no way the police could check that statement on the weekend, and so, rather than bother, they might let the matter slide.

  But the trip passed without incident, and Kurt, Hella, Kadi and the baby arrived safely at Kadi’s parents’ farm in Pomerania. There was no question about the Riedes’ welcome; there was the added practical advantage of having extra hands for the potato harvest at a time when farm labor was scarce. It was hard, monotonous work, done in an uncomfortable kneeling posture, but Kurt’s joy was unbridled. At last he could do something that was tangible and physical and helpful to others as well as himself.

  For four weeks they pushed their shovels into the rich soil and dug out potatoes, and lived with the assurance that the Allied planes passing overhead would not drop their bombs on them. If he could have, Kurt would have gladly spent the rest of the war working on the farm, but that, he knew, was impossible. He was being passed off to the neighbors as a soldier on convalescent leave; to stay longer than a month would be to invite suspicion and trouble, not only for himself but for Kadi’s parents.

  So at the end of the month Kadi’s sister drove them in a horse-drawn cart to the farm of Beppo’s parents, twenty kilometers away. Their reception here was very different. “Get these people away from me,” Beppo’s father muttered to Kadi when he learned who the Riedes were. Their presence endangered all of them, he argued. He was right, but no one else took his side, and eventually even he accepted their presence.

  Four weeks later Kadi’s sister came to collect them, and took them to the railway station, where they boarded a train for the return trip to Berlin, their satchels loaded with poultry, eggs, pork and produce. In his own suitcase Kurt proudly carried several geese back to the city.

  Once again the journey was unquestioned.

  Kurt felt reborn. Not only had he enjoyed a respite from the bombings for the better part of two months but he had met and passed a test of courage that had done wonders for his self-esteem. He had gone to the farms out of fear—but it had taken courage to go there. Twice he had run a gauntlet full of real and imagined dangers. The least display of anxiety on his part could have given him and the others away. As frightened as he had been, nothing outward had distinguished him from any other dispirited German traveler in the beginning of the fifth year of a war that all but the most fanatical of them now knew their country was going to lose.

  Safely back in Wittenau, Kurt vowed not to let the bombings affect him, and he quietly went about arranging a way to express his gratitude to Kadi’s parents. At their farm he had noticed that the drive belt on the flour grinder was so worn and frayed that it could scarcely power the mill. Now, from the baron’s leather shop where he had once worked, he obtained a new belt to replace the old one—which, to Kadi’s parents as well as all those the mill supplied with flour, was worth more at this moment than any sum of money.

  There had been moments during his solitude when Willy Glaser would have traded a year of his life for an evening at the opera, but even he had to admit that life had improved. It had been six months since he had been forced to move from George Meier’s summer home. A few days before he was supposed to vacate the house, and still with no place to go, he’d taken an enormous risk and told the truth to a neighbor. He’d just blurted it out on an impulse one day while he was working in the garden and the neighbor was leaning against the fence, exchanging pleasantries, all but inviting Willy to confide in him, hinting that he had already guessed Willy’s story. Although the neighbor didn’t look Jewish, and certainly hadn’t said that he was, he made a point of using certain Yiddish expressions that had been adopted by many Germans. What was the man trying to convey? That he was friendly? That he had Jewish friends or business associates? That his wife was Jewish? Whatever the reason, Willy’s surmise had been right. Once he had explained his predicament, the neighbor—who never told him his name—offered to let him use a small room on the second floor of his house. Conditions again. Willy was not to tell anyone where he was living. And he was never to be seen entering or leaving. Willy assured the man on both counts, and gratefully moved in.

  Where his former house had been made of wood, and daylight was visible through the cracks, this one was built of stone and free of drafts. There were three rooms downstairs and a fourth on the second floor. That was where Willy lived.

  In any other life this would have to be considered a wretched existence, but where the objective of life was survival alone, Willy could feel that he was doing well. Not only was he secure; for the first time since he had gone illegal he was warm. He could light a lamp at night. His benefactor extracted hard labor in exchange for the shelter—Willy chopped cords and cords of wood—but he was a kind man who had even lanced a dreadful boil on the back of Willy’s neck.

  Willy kept his word. He told no one where he lived. And on the days when he wanted to leave the house he would be gone by 5:00 A.M. and would not return until after dark. When the air raids began in the evenings he would run into the woods for shelter. From there he would watch the flares they called “Christmas trees” light up the ground, and the bombs burst near the antiaircraft emplacements a few miles away. But no bombs had even come close to his hiding place—still further evidence that divine Providence guarded him or that his life was somehow charmed.

  And then one day in November 1943 Willy Glaser’s luck ran out.

  That morning he had chopped half a cord of wood for the owner, gotten tired and gone to his room to nap. He was awakened by voices in the garden. Instinctively he raised his head to peep out the window. It was at just that moment that one of the two men standing in the garden happened to look up.

  “Who are you?” he called out.

  Paralyzed with fear, Willy didn’t answer.

  “Come down here!” the man commanded.

  In the garden, Willy could see a party insignia on the man’s coat.

  “What is your name?” the man said.

  “Wilhelm Glaser.”

  “Are you a Jew?”

  “No.”

  They handcuffed him and took him to the police station in Müggelheim. The police asked to see his papers. He had none. They asked where he had previously liv
ed. He gave them his correct address. They called the police station in his old neighborhood and learned not only that he was Jewish but that he had escaped once before.

  Several hours later Willy was in the basement of the heavy stone building on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse where Jews scheduled for deportation were gathered, the very building to which he had gone to say goodbye to his mother and to which he had been on his way ten months before. He was filled with bitterness. Ten months of cold, hunger, loneliness and danger endured, only to be captured.

  20

  FROM THE DAY that she and Mother had moved into Frau Otto’s apartment in Pankow, Ruth Thomas had done her best to forget that she was a Jew, as Tante Lisel had admonished her to. It was an act of pretense that, given her upbringing and her memories, as well as the sheer joy she had experienced as a young Jewish woman, made all of her previous efforts at masking reality seem small by comparison. Not only could there be no religious observance of any kind, there could be no nostalgia for those culturally rich and festive times. Nor could she afford self-pity; whatever she felt about life in Berlin could be no more and no less than what any Berliner felt.

  By way of commemorating her new identity, Ruth destroyed her Jewish star and her mother’s as well. The only remnant of her past she kept was her identity card. She knew she would need the card when this nightmare ended, and so she sewed it into the hem of the gray flannel skirt she wore the most often.