The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  “A kilo of coffee, a kilo of sugar, two cartons of cigarettes, and he’s yours,” would come the typical reply. Once the payment was made, the captive would be released.

  Inevitably the work got to him. Marushka could see it in the set line of his mouth or the strain in his face when he dropped into her flat. “I had a rough day today,” he told her once. “I bought back several people. The S.S. was really tough. They want more and more. They saw we really wanted those people. They drove a hard bargain.” He sagged against his chair and rubbed his face and let out a long sigh. “Isn’t it disgusting to barter a pack of cigarettes or a jar of marmalade or a kilo of coffee for a human life?”

  Once they had the people back they had to provide them with lodging, food and papers showing that they were authorized to live or work in Berlin. Often that was where Marushka came in. She had a network of safe houses in which the fugitives could stay for a night or two at a time, as well as an excellent source for counterfeit ration cards, a Chinese printer who worked out of a cellar on the north side of Berlin. Counterfeit identity papers required valid blank forms, but those could be obtained with the help of friendly policemen—sometimes for a bribe, often for nothing. After a document had been forged, there remained the problem of an official stamp. It had to be lifted from some old document and placed on the new one. Marushka accomplished that with an old trick borrowed from her school days, rolling a shelled hard-boiled egg over the old stamp, then transferring the ink onto the new document.

  Most of the old documents came from black market sources. Some of the documents were collected from fugitives being smuggled from the country who no longer had need of them. On at least one occasion a document came from an outright theft. Marushka was in line at the grocery one day behind a woman whose pocketbook, hanging from her arm, was gaping open. Inside was the woman’s passport. While the woman intently watched the clerk totting up her bill, Marushka gently relieved her of the passport.

  The longer the war against the Jews ground on, the more difficult it became to buy them back. Not only did the prices continue to rise, the sellers became more devious. One day Wesslen grimly reported a new tactic by the sellers: to chase after the people they’d just released, take them back into custody and ransom them once more.

  Over the weeks Wesslen developed a series of escape routes designed to prevent recapture. He enlisted Marushka’s help. One evening he picked up a group of six elderly Jews from the Gestapo and drove them to a rendezvous point, where he turned them over to Marushka. As she led them through a culvert she realized she was being followed. She hid at a bend in the culvert until her pursuer overtook her and then shot him in the leg. The sound of the shot reverberated as though a dozen cannons had gone off. Marushka and the Jews rushed away.

  The next day Marushka reported the incident to Wesslen. He was enraged. “That was the stupidest thing you ever did,” he shouted. “You should have killed him.”

  Marushka held out her hands imploringly. “I can’t kill a man who hasn’t got a gun,” she said.

  “Of course he had a gun.”

  “But he didn’t have it out.”

  “You’re useless,” Wesslen said. “Now we can never use that route again.” He refused to talk to Marushka for several days.

  But eventually he forgave her—first, because she was the most valuable ally he had and, second, because he needed her for a vital role in the best plan ever hatched to smuggle Jews out of Berlin.

  And now, six weeks later, having played her role, she was trapped in a forest without the slightest clue as to how to get out alive.

  Dawn came. Marushka was frozen and hungry, but she was still afraid to move. Whoever had tracked her through the night would be waiting for her to leave the woods. With her wet and filthy clothes she would give herself away.

  She waited through the day, praying for an air raid, the only diversion she could imagine that would enable her to escape. As darkness fell, the four curtains of lights came on again. She was still trapped, still hunted.

  And then she heard the sirens. Sweet, sweet sound!

  Moments later the curtains of lights went out. She heard the bombers droning in and then the thudding explosions. Now or never, she thought. Crouching, weaving, she made her way through the trees until she reached the edge of the forest. Just then there was a tremendous explosion as a bomb hit a factory. Soon the factory was blazing, turning night to dawn. Marushka could see that the road was empty. The moment the all clear sounded she made a dash for the factory. As she had hoped, everyone was suddenly too busy with the fire to pay attention to a lone figure running down the road.

  For an hour she helped fight the fire. Soon her clothes were no more wet and soiled than those of the others around her. As soon as the fire was under control she approached an official. “I’m not from this area,” she said. “I was here visiting friends and got caught by the raid, and then I helped put out your fire. Now can you give me some kind of paper saying that’s what I’ve done?” She got the paper without question.

  By the next afternoon Marushka had made her way back to Wilmersdorf. When no one was looking she scaled the wall of the churchyard on the Kaiserallee. Wesslen opened to her knock. With him was Erik Perwe, the minister who had succeeded Birger Forell the year before. “Are you going to faint?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Perwe grabbed her and led her to a couch.

  “How about the people?” she asked.

  “They made it,” Wesslen said. “They should be on their way to Sweden.”

  Perwe handed her a glass of champagne. She took a sip and fainted.

  Involved as she was and great as were the risks she took, Marushka never would learn the depth of the involvement of the Church of Sweden in efforts to assist Jews. Even those persons who worked for the church, either formally or, like Wesslen, informally, did not know everything that was going on. There was only one person who did.

  23

  HE WOULD SIT for hours in the churchyard, working on his ancient charcoal-powered automobile. His staff never understood what he accomplished by his endless tinkering, so they invented an expression to describe it. He was, they said, “polishing his screws.” Wearing a smock and beret, he looked like a French mechanic. Strangers to the church would invariably approach him to ask where they might find the minister. “Well, sit down,” Erik Perwe would say. It would take the strangers several moments to realize that they stood before the brains and guts of the most organized effort in all Berlin to save its remaining Jews.

  He was a small but sturdily built man in his late thirties, with burrowing brown eyes that peered out from under protruding brows. Most of the time he walked about with an intense, preoccupied look, as though to warn others away from the secret knowledge he kept. But his smile, when he flashed it, was as hearty as a clown’s, and he had the polished diplomat’s gift for saying and doing all the right things at the right times. He never said more than a situation demanded, but if the situation demanded a story that would cheer up his listeners, he’d tell that story. While he was concerned with the plight of all oppressed persons, he spent most of his spiritual and psychological resources on the Jews who came to him for help.

  One day in September 1942, two weeks after he and his family had settled into the large city villa that served as church, community house and home, Martha Perwe, a striking woman whose beauty was not disguised by the prim garb of a preacher’s wife, went down to her husband’s basement office to fetch him for lunch. To her astonishment she found a crowd of Jews waiting outside his door, their heads bowed, the Star of David on their coats.

  Perwe did not take lunch that day. Instead he sat through the afternoon in his oak chair at his oak desk, listening to his visitors’ stories. When he finally came upstairs that evening he removed his horn-rimmed spectacles, rubbed his bloodshot eyes, and said to Martha, “I feel like a lemon squeezed dry.”

  “What can you do for them?” she asked.

/>   “I can get them food. I can arrange housing. I can send letters for them.”

  “Does that satisfy them?”

  “Seldom.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “I take them in my arms. I cry with them.”

  Perwe’s dedication to his work was rooted in his belief that God had called him to it. His Church’s dedication, no less intense, was both mystical and historical. Its fascination with the Jews went back a hundred years to the time when Jews first began migrating to Sweden. The Church’s reaction then had been twofold. First, it attacked the Jews as Christ killers, the classic but superficial response. Second, it sought to convert them.

  But the fascination that the Jews held for the Church of Sweden in modern times was only partially explained by its desire for conversions. What lay behind the Church’s concern was a sense of guilt for the suspicion in which it had initially held the Jews. The Church’s efforts during the Hitler era sprang from a strong desire to atone for its initial attitude.

  Coincidentally there existed a practical mechanism for atonement. In 1903 the Church of Sweden had begun to establish missions in those foreign cities in which many of its members had foundered after emigrating from Sweden in the hope of reaching America. Once the plight of the Jews became evident, it was only natural that the Church’s Swedish-Israel Mission, founded in the 1870s to assist Jews socially and spiritually—and to convert them—would work through these outlets.

  The first major rescue operation began in Vienna in the 1930s, after Austrian priests had been frustrated by the Nazis in their own efforts to help baptized Jews escape the persecutions. Göte Hedenqvist, a minister of the Church of Sweden, was asked by the headquarters of the Austrian Evangelical Church to come to Vienna to assist the converts. But once on the scene, Hedenqvist began to give help to nonbaptized Jews as well. “If they come to me for help, I can’t ask them if they are Christians or not,” he told his superiors.

  One thousand children and two thousand adult Jews were rescued from Austria before the war made further efforts there impossible. Hedenqvist returned to Sweden and took over the Swedish Mission to the Jews—another name for the Swedish-Israel Mission—as well as the task of resettling Jews then coming to Sweden from Germany with the help of the Church.

  The pastor of the Swedish church in Berlin at that time was Birger Forell, a man “as single-minded,” one of his parishioners once observed, “as a dog who’s got hold of your pants.” Forell had been in Berlin since 1929; from the moment of the Nazi takeover in 1933 he had been helping Jews and other oppressed persons with a tenacity that often overpowered local authorities. But by 1941 Forell had received so many warnings from powerful Nazis to stop his rescue efforts that he knew his usefulness had ended. In a letter to Perwe, he said, “You should prepare yourself to take over.”

  Perwe’s first involvement with the beleaguered Jews had occurred in 1935 when he went to Vienna to observe the rescue efforts of Hedenqvist, an old friend and colleague. On his return to Sweden, Perwe lectured extensively on the plight of the Jews in Austria; one by one, he stated, they were disappearing. At each of his lectures Swedish Nazis would march noisily into the meeting place and heckle him. But Perwe kept talking, and his speeches came to the attention of Archbishop Earling Eidem, who decided that Perwe, whom he had known since his student days, belonged in Berlin. In 1939 the archbishop sent him there. His specific mission: to get Jews out of Germany.

  What Perwe found dismayed him. It was not simply that by then the Jews were being persecuted in a manner and on a scale that had been unimaginable’ to him, it was that his German brothers in God were, for the most part, doing nothing about it. Individual ministers and their congregants were trying to save baptized Jews, but, with a few courageous exceptions, almost nothing was being done to help the overwhelming majority of nonbaptized Jews, and—worst of all—the churches were officially silent. A few scattered sermons here and there, but otherwise no protests of any kind.

  Why? Perwe asked himself. Was it because the churches feared for their own survival in the Third Reich, resounding with pagan overtones and the deification of Hitler? Or was it because they were so frightened of socialism and so nationalistic that they considered it necessary to support the Reich uncritically as it brought Germany back to life? Was it because they too, like most other Germans, had felt it would be good for the country to reduce the Jewish presence in business, the professions and the arts? Was it, finally, because the German churches, deep down, were uncomfortable about the Jews, saw them as aliens whose participation in the society somehow diluted the Germanic essence—because, in short, the churches, their clergy and parishioners, in the overwhelming majority of cases, simply didn’t like Jews?

  Whatever the reasons, whatever the answers, Perwe was appalled. He returned to Sweden in 1941 badly shaken by his experience. Forell’s letter, which he received soon after his return, threw him into a quandary. He was not at all keen about taking his wife and three daughters—the eldest was only seven—into a war zone. And yet how could he refuse to go if his presence in Berlin might save the lives of even a few persecuted Jews? “Is this the answer to the question of the future?” he asked himself on one of the lined pages of the black soft-cover diary he filled regularly with brief yet tantalizing notes.

  In the spring of 1942 the Nazis told Forell that he was no longer welcome in Germany. Forell informed Perwe. “God calls. I must obey,” Perwe wrote in his diary. On June 21 he received a telegram from Berlin confirming his election to the parish priesthood there. “God help me and us all,” he noted. The Perwe family left Sweden for Germany on the last day of August, an emotionally taxing transition he covered with two cryptic entries in his diary: “August 31, 1942: Departure from Norrköping to Berlin. Many people at the train to see me off. Touching, painful, encouraging. September 1, 1942: Train to Berlin. Many people. Very warm. Met by legation’s car. At residence met Sister Vide. God bless our arrival.”

  The Swedish church was in the reception hall of a large and gracious villa on the Landhausstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, an attractive residential neighborhood. The street was lined with linden trees. In the back of the villa was an enormous informal garden that ran the length of the block to the Kaiserallee, one of the major thoroughfares leading to the center of the city two miles to the north. To those who worked in the church or came to it for help the villa and garden, which was like a private park, seemed a world apart in wartime Berlin. The bombings would soon make it that almost literally. So many houses and apartment buildings at both sides of the villa were flattened that the church stood virtually alone.

  But it was the emotional ambience even more than its physical isolation that set the church apart. Whereas before the war the atmosphere had been moral, pious, even narrow, now it was expansive and often explosive—merry, easygoing, elastic, tolerant. Visitors to the church might be offered brandy and cigars—something seldom if ever observed there prior to the war. There was always a pot of soup and another of coffee on the stove; anyone who needed a meal got one, whatever the hour. Sides of pork hung from the pegs on which women parishioners had once placed their fur coats. There were so many unexpected visitors that the staff’s sleeping quarters were often preempted, forcing them to double up. They didn’t mind that or the eighteen hours of work they often put in each day. They knew that they were experiencing the kind of community they had always hoped to find in service to the Church but had never previously encountered. The people they helped helped them in turn, looking upon them as saviors, operators of a way station on the road to salvation. They knew they weren’t superfluous, and no matter how difficult their work became, that knowledge made life easy—at least for the kind of people they were.

  The most exuberant among them was Sister Vide Ohmann, a trained nurse functioning additionally as a social worker in these emergency times. Sister Vide was a vivacious young woman whose lovely face, as fresh as a milkmaid’s, broadcast her turbulent emotions. A lifelong resid
ent of Berlin, she had translated all the anguish and anger and confusion she felt over the changes produced by the Nazis into a single, powerful desire to help the victims of its policies. She walked about the church and residence with a look that said, “If you want my hands, here they are.” There was little that she and her colleagues were not prepared to do to make life easier for the Jews.

  The major job of the women in the church was to care for the Jewish itinerants who regularly inhabited the building. There might be twenty at a time—bent, thin, seemingly without hope. Perwe would see them all. One day he said to Vide, “I’m not living one life. I’m living twenty every day.” Precisely how the minister helped the Jews the women never knew. They put it out of their minds. “Please never ask when you see anything here,” Perwe had told them. “It’s better that you don’t know.”

  Part of what the minister was doing was creating false identities. The best possible paper was the Kennkarte, the obligatory national identity card. To obtain it one had to show a certificate of baptism. Such certificates could be readily counterfeited, but they had to be backed by the church’s records. Accordingly, Jews who were given false baptismal certificates were also “inscribed” in the church’s baptismal records, which went back to 1905.

  And then, of course, there was the clandestine purchase of Jews from contacts in the Gestapo. Perwe was in charge of that operation as well, but he left it mostly in Wesslen’s hands. He could not get over Wesslen. The man seemed drawn to danger. Why else would a man choose Berlin in the early 1940s, when the bombings had already begun, for his studies in landscape architecture? Wesslen was thirty years old, but he seemed at times to have the outlook of an adventure-loving schoolboy. The greater the risk, the more he liked it. He still looked somewhat like a schoolboy too, innocent and good-natured. His manner was so open that no one would ever have suspected him of wrongdoing. In fact, he had a flair for anything and everything crooked. He was a master at getting along with and using the Gestapo. His underground contacts were seemingly inexhaustible. A feverishly active man, he knew where to trade a bottle of brandy for a set of tires, a pound of butter for a tank of gas. His bartering supplies—food, wine and cigarettes obtained from Sweden—were as plentiful as his contacts and his energy.