And then, one night several weeks later, the building was finally hit. They could feel the impact in the cellar. As soon as the all clear sounded they rushed upstairs. A fire raged on the roof. All of the tenants pumped and carried water until the fire was out. Exhausted, they left the roof, only to discover that the floor of the flat just below the roof was still burning. There were only two men present, Fritz and a sixty-five-year-old man named Koch, whose left side was paralyzed. Fritz took an axe and ripped out the floor and threw the burning planks from the window until the fire was out.
His efforts made him the unofficial hero of Bayerische Strasse 5. From that day on, the tenants all smiled whenever they saw him, as if to say, “It’s okay. Herr Kramer is here.”
31
BY THE END of spring 1944, almost a year and a half after he had gone underground, the most that Willy Glaser could say for his existence was that he was still alive. For months now, ever since her husband’s return had forced him from the home of his homely angel, Willy had been sleeping in the woods, wondering if he would ever again sleep in a bed. His clothing was all but in tatters. He had lost fifty pounds and was now so thin that he had to hold his pants up with a piece of rope. The soles of his shoes were so worn and his socks so full of holes that when he walked his bare feet scaped the pavement. He was constantly wet and cold, and developing chronic bronchitis. The days when he didn’t eat outnumbered the days when he did. There were times when he could go to the back door of the grocery owned by his friend and get a small supply of provisions. Once the grocer gave him some butter, which he sold to other friends; that money kept him in food for several days. On another occasion a friend gave him ration tickets for bread. From time to time he was able to make himself useful to black marketeers, which earned him carrots and lettuce. But his hunger was never appeased. The most mournful fact of all, however, was not Willy’s constant hunger; it was the realization that he was now a beggar. He would have joyfully worked if he could, but there was no way that he could. So he spent his days asking for food and searching for cigarette butts. These he would either smoke as they were or hoard for his pipe until he had enough tobacco for a bowlful.
Each day Willy wandered the streets, his thoughts his only companions. As hungry as he was, there was a greater problem than food. It was shoes. The grocer and other friends found new shoes for him from time to time, but each pair wore out quickly because of the miles and miles of walking.
He kept moving, knowing that if he loitered he would attract attention. In the morning he watched the Berliners on their way to work, and in the evening he stood at the Friedrichstrasse railway station feeling a heaviness in his throat as he watched them go home. He watched the audiences filing into the opera. On two occasions he risked going to the Metropol Theater—sympathetic ushers let him in—but attending the opera was out of the question because of his clothes. It was astounding if you reflected on it—as Willy, given all his idle time, often did: Here was the city being ground down further and further each day to rubble and ash and pretzel-shaped girders, and yet each day the Berliners formed long lines at the cinemas and supported more than one hundred plays.
Germans have a word to describe that devious response by which humans sometimes rejoice over others’ misfortunes. They call it Schadenfreude. But Willy’s emotions as he viewed the ever greater destruction of the city on his daily walks were a good deal more complex than that. He wanted the destruction, to be sure—more ruinous and punishing and faster than it was being meted out. But the Berliners rushing to their concerts and operas and plays and films reminded him of what the city had once been and what it had meant to him.
If Willy had a home it was a bench in a little corner of a park in Pankow known as the Kissing Place. He thought of it as his corner. Jews were not permitted to sit on park benches, but he did it anyway, just as he continued to wash and shave in public restrooms, where Jews weren’t permitted either. Inasmuch as Berlin had been officially Judenfrei since May 19, 1943, it was important to act like the increasing numbers of Germans whose lives had been disrupted, even devastated, by the bombings. Willy knew that the official pronouncement had been a lie, that even now, more than a year later, Jewish “U-boats” still surfaced to prowl the streets, just as he did, in search of food and objects for barter. But he was as alert for other Jews as he was for the police patrols; who knew which Jew he met might not see in him an object to be traded for his own salvation?
So Willy thought of his park bench as a sanctuary where, alone for a few hours, he could relax a little. There he would sit and study the trees and watch the birds and sometimes inadvertently fall asleep even though it was dangerous to do that.
As Willy approached his bench one day he saw, to his dismay, that it was occupied. A young woman was sitting there sewing uniforms. He judged that she was in forced labor. He wondered if she was Jewish, a privileged Jew of some kind. Her features were little help. She was certainly not a prototypical blond and blue-eyed “Aryan”; yet many Germans had such dark hair and chiseled features. Maybe yes, maybe no; he couldn’t take the chance. He walked on without stopping or speaking.
But when Willy returned to the Kissing Place the next day the woman was there again. She looked up and smiled at him. This time he sat down.
“Good day,” she said.
Willy muttered a greeting that was deliberately unintelligible.
“How is it that you’re not at work?”
“I work the night shift,” Willy lied.
The following day the woman, whom Willy judged to be in her early thirties, ten years younger than himself, told him that her name was Ruth Gomma. Willy nodded but did not tell her his name.
Each day that he came to the bench from then on, Ruth Gomma was there. Each day she did such talking as passed between them. One day Willy fell asleep, and Ruth Gomma opened the briefcase that he always carried with him, both as a status symbol and a repository for his toilet articles. Inside, in addition to his toilet kit and blanket, she found a copy of Crime and Punishment. She knew then that Willy had no job, because a real worker would be carrying a meal with him to his shift.
Willy was not reading Crime and Punishment—he had read it years before and hadn’t liked it—but was carrying it around to give his briefcase a weight identical to what it would have if, in fact, he was carrying a meal.
When Willy awakened he found that Ruth’s questions had taken another tack. It seemed to him that she was testing him now to determine how well he had been educated. Again he hedged his answers, giving nothing away, not even the background that might identify him in the smallest degree. He did not want this woman to have a single clue in the event that she was questioned about him.
But then Ruth asked Willy if he was interested in the theater, and for the first time in years a tiny crack appeared in the wall of misery that had encircled this passionate lover of the arts. They talked for an hour about favorite plays and playwrights. By the time they had finished they were smiling at each other, if not as old and cherished friends, then as two people who had discovered the possibility of friendship. Ruth confirmed then what Willy had suspected; she was a privileged Jew. Her father, now dead, had been Jewish, but her mother was a Christian. She lived with her mother in an apartment nearby, she told him. And then, in an off hand manner, she asked if he would like to come to her house for a bite to eat. Willy wanted that bite to eat, and those few hours of shelter, more than anything he had ever wanted in his life. But he refused the invitation because he had no proof that Ruth Gomma was who she said she was, and he couldn’t take the chance that accompanying her might somehow lead to his discovery.
The next day Ruth invited him again. And the next, and each day thereafter, until Willy finally succumbed. She gave him supper; it was a simple meal, but it nearly made him weep. Then she asked him his name. He refused to tell her. “It’s better that you don’t know,” Willy said.
Willy became a regular visitor to Ruth Gomma’s house. Time and time ag
ain she tried to tease him into revealing his name. Time and again he refused. One day he quoted Lohengrin: “Never you ask me whence I came, nor what my name.”
“I have it!” Ruth said with a laugh. “I’ll call you ‘Lo.’”
There was really no doubt in Ruth’s mind at this point about the basic identity of “Lo.” When she had seen him for the first time in the park she noted his black hair and long sideburns and mustache and thought perhaps that he was a foreign worker. But such remarks as he had made to her at first had been in faultless high German, which few foreign workers would speak, and so she had concluded that this man must be an illegal Jew. She had not particularly liked him at first, but he had intrigued her, and his knowledge of the performing arts had impressed her. For Ruth as well their conversations had opened a crack in the misery that had enveloped her since 1940, when she had begun to work at forced labor.
Four months had passed since those initial conversations. During that time the crack had widened considerably. As improbable and crazy as it was, Ruth had to admit that she had fallen in love—and she was as sure as a woman can be that her Lo had too.
32
THE BOMBS continued to rain on the industrial works in Wittenau, as well as on the gas works and Tegel airfield nearby. Considering the destruction that daily increased around them, Joseph and Kadi Wirkus had to consider themselves extremely fortunate. Their house had not been hit in the eight months since the massive Allied bombings of Berlin had begun. And considering the risk they were taking, their blessings were more numerous still. Kurt and Hella Riede had been with them for a year now, but not once in that time had there been so much as a hint that the Gestapo was on their trail. More than that, the bonds between the two couples had continued to strengthen, to the point that they thought of themselves as one family. Thanks to the food the elder Wirkuses sent from the farm, there was always plenty to eat. And Wilfried, the baby, was now a lusty one and a half years old. Given such evidence, Beppo and Kadi could be excused for wondering if God wasn’t rewarding them, after all, for saving Kurt and Hella.
In May, Beppo received a bonanza, a four-week trip to Marienbad, Czechoslovakia, courtesy of the federal insurance agency, for himself, Kadi and the baby. Ostensibly the trip was for therapy. His elbow, the one he’d injured permanently as a child—which had kept him out of the service—had been giving him trouble, and it was thought that the baths might help him. But it was also a glorious chance for a respite from the bombings and, even more, for the first real vacation they had had since the beginning of the war.
But the trip finally made real a question both couples had often pondered in theory: What to do if and when the Wirkuses left Wittenau for any length of time and the Riedes remained? All of their discussions had led to only one plan. In the event that they were challenged, Kurt was to pose as Beppo, and Hella as Kadi, using their false identity cards as proof. If anyone asked about another couple that was said to be living in the house, they were to say that a man and a woman whose house had been bombed out had lived with them for a while but had left several weeks before. They were taking an extraordinary chance, and all of them knew it, but how much more would they be incriminating themselves than they already had?
And so the Wirkuses went off to Marienbad, apprehensive about leaving the Riedes, but ecstatic over their good fortune. By way of sharing their bounty, they telephoned the Jerneitzigs, their landlords, whose dwelling had been demolished, and invited them to use their bedroom while they were gone. The greengrocer had already made plans to be away from Berlin, but Mrs. Jerneitzig gratefully accepted.
The sun had scarcely risen one morning several days after the Wirkuses’ departure when the bell at the garden gate rang. Hella, up early, looked out the window and saw two men standing at the gate. She had never seen either of them before. The thought of confronting them filled her with dread, but she was without an alternative. Kurt was upstairs in the bedroom, still asleep. Nor was there any sound of stirring in the Wirkuses’ room, where Mrs. Jerneitzig slept with her two children. Ursula, the flirtatious young factory worker who rented the downstairs bedroom, was still asleep as well.
As she walked down the path to the gate Hella could almost feel the blood pumping hard from her heart and priming her muscles for flight. “Yes?” she said.
What happened next did not seem real. The man in front took out an identification and showed it to her and said, “We are from the Gestapo.” But he was a nice-looking man in his middle thirties and he was smiling pleasantly at her, and as she passed him and his partner through the gate and led them up the path, wondering if she would make it to the door, it registered on her that in all the times she had imagined how it might happen, she had never envisioned a pleasant smile on the face of her captor.
The pleasant-looking man told his partner to wait outside. Then he took Hella by the arm and led her to the kitchen. “You look a little faint,” he said solicitously. “Perhaps you should take some brandy.”
“There’s a tenant asleep in the next room,” Hella said weakly as they entered the kitchen.
He closed the door. “No one need hear our business,” he said. Even as he began to speak the words Hella had prayed she would never hear he still smiled pleasantly, almost appreciatively at her.
“Are you the mistress of this house?”
“I am.”
“May I see your papers, please?”
Hella fetched her one piece of identity, the pregnancy priority card with her picture and Kadi’s name on it. She gave it to the Gestapo agent, who stared at her shaking hand for a moment and then smiled at her again. Then he studied the card and nodded and said, “And where is Herr Wirkus?”
“He is in Marienbad, on convalescent leave, to receive treatments for his elbow.” As Hella spoke she put an arm on the table to support herself, and prayed that Kurt would not awaken and call out, “Hella, what’s the matter?” Or that Ursula would not come into the kitchen and say, “Guten Tag, Frau Riede.” Or that Mrs. Jerneitzig and the children would not begin to make noises upstairs.
“You have been denounced for harboring a Jewish couple,” the Gestapo agent said.
“I can’t understand that,” Hella said. “There are no Jews here.” Each word passed through her dry throat like a rasp.
“Have you ever had a couple living here with you?”
“Yes. There was a couple. We met them in a cafe. They told us they had been bombed out of their flat in Berlin. We took them in for several days because we pitied them, but then they left and we haven’t seen them since.” Hella bit her lip, playing the part. “It was really my idea. I hope this won’t get my husband into trouble at his office.”
The Gestapo agent smiled again. “How long is it since they were here?”
“A month at least.”
“I see,” the Gestapo agent said. His smile now was the kind a man gives a woman when he wishes to communicate his interest, and yet when he put his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze, what he seemed to be communicating more than anything was reassurance. “I want you to tell your story to my partner, so that he can write out a report.” He paused and looked into her eyes. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a little brandy?” he said then.
“No. Just let me excuse myself for a moment.” She left the kitchen and went to the pump and held onto it for a moment and then let cold water pour over her wrists. When she came back to the kitchen, the agent led her outside and told her to repeat the story. Several times during the narration he prompted her, so that the story became even more emphatic than when she had told it to him. There was no doubt now, the Gestapo agent was helping her. If only Kurt would remain asleep! If only Ursula and the Jerneitzigs would remain in their rooms.
The second agent closed his notebook and put his pen away. The two men started down the path. “Auf Wiedersehen,” Hella said.
The first agent turned around and smiled at her in that same warm and solicitous manner. “Better not ‘auf Wiedersehen,’�
� he said. He turned then, and they left.
For a long moment Hella stood, unable to move, not simply from fright but from astonishment. What the agent had just said made it clear that he knew. He had said in effect, “Let’s hope we don’t meet again.”
In Marienbad several days later Beppo was returning from the baths when the hotel manager rushed up to him. “Your wife fainted a few minutes ago. She’s upstairs in bed.”
Beppo vaulted the steps to the room. Kadi, her skin chalky, her lips trembling, handed him Kurt’s letter, detailing the Gestapo’s visit. The letter also informed them that the Riedes had cleared out that day, that they had had to tell Ursula the truth to impress on her that she must stay and feed the chickens, that they had gone to sit in an S-Bahn for several hours, and that finally they had gone in desperation to the hiding place of another illegal Jew, Willy Katz, with whom Kurt had worked at the baron’s leather warehouse, and that after Hella had gotten down on her knees and begged, the Katzes had agreed to take them in, but only for a few days.
Now that the charade had ended, the dam that Kadi had erected within herself to hold back her fears gave way, and fright flooded her body. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she said to Beppo. “They’ll find us and kill us.”
“No. We’ll stay,” Beppo said. “If the Gestapo is going to get us, they’ll get us wherever we are.”
33
EVERY DAY of his confinement in Frau Jauch’s five-by-six-foot tool shed Hans Rosenthal had a visitor, some member of one of the three antifascist families in the neighborhood that knew of his existence and helped Frau Jauch sustain him. The visitor would bring a few potatoes or a turnip or a piece of bread, exchange a few whispered words with Hans, and then slip out through the cottage and the store to the street. And there were occasional visits from Grandmother Agnes, who brought food, but because she was there ostensibly to do business with Frau Jauch, she couldn’t linger either. Such news as she had she gave him in whispers. Once she started to tell him about his cousin Ruth Thomas, who had also gone underground, but Hans stopped her. If he was captured and tortured, the less he knew the better.
The Last Jews in Berlin Page 24
