So it was that during the fifteen months of his confinement Hans really had only Frau Jauch to speak to. A less likely soul mate for a young man of eighteen could scarcely be imagined. Her contribution to the brief conversation they had each evening in hushed voices had not changed from what it had been at the outset of his confinement fifteen months before—interpretations of events and prophecies of the future based on her reading of the Bible. Hans would nod agreeably to whatever statement she made, but he was scarcely willing to attribute his survival to Scriptural divination.
When he had first come to Frau Jauch’s in March of 1943 Hans had expected his confinement to last no more than three or four months. Had he known he would still be in hiding fifteen months later he might not have been able to make it. Frau Jauch must have sensed his claustrophobic restlessness, because, in addition to trying to relieve it with a daily newspaper, she had brought him a primitive radio. At night he could listen to the Berlin broadcasts with the volume at its lowest and his ear pressed against the earphone. And then, early in 1944, she surprised him again with a more powerful and battery-operated model with which he could pick up the BBC in the early morning hours. The signal was very weak and frequently faded away, but each contact injected him with fresh hope.
In her quiet way this frail and tiny woman had managed to sustain him through his unimaginably lonely ordeal. Her existence was so basic to his survival it was as though they were connected by an umbilical cord, through which flowed not just nourishment but the resources by which he could maintain his sanity. Hans did not even want to think about what would happen to him if Frau Jauch were injured or killed in an air raid.
If Frau Jauch herself ever thought about what her presence meant to Hans, she never mentioned it or expressed it in nonverbal ways. Had she had a son, he would have been approximately Hans’s age, but she was a spinster, without parental experience, and in spite of everything she had done for him, she had never directly or indirectly asked of him the affection due a mother.
In a way it was just as well. For a Jew in Germany—as Hans knew so well by now—affection was a decided risk. His parents were dead. His brother Gert had been deported to God knew what fate. One uncle had died in Buchenwald, the other at home after two weeks of Gestapo torture. So it was no good to love other people, because you wound up losing the objects of your love.
And then one night in July, Hans learned how effectively he had been fooling himself.
That night Frau Jauch was suddenly seized by violent pains in her lower abdomen. For the second time since he had arrived fifteen months earlier Hans left the vicinity of her house; he raced to the home of a neighbor he knew to be friendly. The neighbor called an ambulance and then accompanied Frau Jauch to the hospital. Twenty-four hours later Frau Jauch was dead of a ruptured hernia.
Hans was devastated. He knew then not only that Frau Jauch had become like a mother to him but that it was even more than a young son’s love that he felt. For all this time she had been the sole target of his feelings. Her death, he recognized now, was like the loss of an entire family.
From a practical standpoint it was a calamity. There was no way he could continue to live in her house by himself without revealing his presence. Light, noise, odors—any of these could give him away. Moreover, there was no way he could get provisions. If he did not think of something, Hans concluded, he would simply have to turn himself in to the Gestapo. He had just one possibility, a woman two gardens removed from Frau Jauch’s. Her husband was in Russia and her son was in the navy, and she lived in her cottage alone.
Marie Schönebeck had learned a few weeks before that Frau Jauch had a “nephew” living with her, so she was not surprised when Hans appeared. She was, however, astounded by his story, which he revealed to her in full detail. For a moment Hans read her astonishment as disapproval, and he died a little. But then Frau Schönebeck said, as firmly as she could, “You’ll stay here.” Hans exploded with relief.
Frau Schönebeck passed the word to two trustworthy neighbors that she had taken Hans into hiding. Between those neighbors and Frau Jauch’s antifascist friends they managed to collect enough food to feed Hans. But Hans’s situation at Frau Schönebeck’s was much more exposed, and thus more dangerous, than it had been at Frau Jauch’s. During the day he stayed in Frau Schönebeck’s bedroom. At night he moved into the living room and slept on the couch. Whenever visitors came he had to hide quickly. And he had to be certain that there were never two plates or two glasses on Frau Schönebeck’s table.
For several weeks when the bombs fell Hans remained where he was while everyone else went to the shelters. One evening, however, a friendly neighbor pressed him to join the other neighbors in an air raid shelter they had built nearby, a crude excavation covered with logs, which in turn were covered with earth. Apprehensive, Hans refused. “Come on,” the neighbor said, “everyone in there already knows about you.”
The neighbor was so insistent that Hans finally succumbed. With trepidation he followed the neighbor to the shelter. When he stepped inside the shelter his fists were clenched. But when his eyes grew accustomed to the light he realized that all the others were smiling at him and nodding agreeably in greeting. They seemed not only willing to share their shelter but exceedingly happy to have him. Before long Hans understood why. The neighbors knew that Hans had been hiding in Frau Jauch’s house when that bomb had demolished all the surrounding cottages. As long as the Jew who had saved Frau Jauch’s home from destruction was with them, they knew they were safe from the bombs.
34
BEFORE THE DEPARTURE of the Wirkus family for Marienbad, Beppo Wirkus, ever precise, had left the particulars of their return with Kurt and Hella Riede. So when the Wirkuses returned to Berlin late in the evening of a cool June night the Riedes were at the Anhalter railway station to meet them. In spite of the shock he had felt on learning of the Gestapo visit, Beppo was struck once again by how well the Riedes blended into the crowd. Hella, with her blond braids, seemed the most typically German woman on the platform. And Kurt, with his thick glasses, was obviously exempt from military service. Still, Beppo could not help looking up and down the platform for S.S. patrols or Gestapo agents in their unmistakable fedoras.
Kurt quickly brought the Wirkuses up to date. The tiny gardener’s house in Birkenwerder in which Willy Katz and his wife lived had proved to be too small. Katz had found them a new hiding place nearby, with a Gentile family. The Wirkuses agreed that they would come to visit the Riedes, provided they found on their return to Wittenau that there had been no further inquiries.
There had not been, Ursula told them. Nor, to Beppo’s and Kadi’s immense relief, did the Gestapo come for them, as they had feared would happen. Two days later the Wirkuses called on the Riedes. The two couples took a blanket and went to a nearby woods and sat in the shade. There Hella told them the story in detail.
Neither of the Riedes could imagine who had denounced them. They had concluded that a catcher must have spotted Hella, decided she looked suspicious, followed her home and reported her to the Gestapo.
“A ‘catcher?’” Kadi said.
And then Hella had to explain how the Gestapo was using Jews to catch other Jews, and how Jews often had an instinctive feeling about who were Jews and who weren’t.
Then Hella and Kurt confessed that they were miserable in their new hiding place. Their host and his children were very nice to them, but his wife was hysterical with fear that the Riedes’ presence would prove disastrous for her family. She had calmed down a bit a few days after their arrival, but then Hella had been seized with a bad attack of dysentery, and that had made the wife hysterical once more. Moreover, the family was charging them a fortune. The Riedes didn’t say it in so many words, but they implied that if it were ever possible they would like to return to Wittenau.
After he had learned of the Gestapo’s visit, nothing had been further from Beppo’s mind than to invite the Riedes to move back in. But he was furious now with
the actions of their hostess, who did everything she could to remind the Riedes how dependent they were on her for their survival. For her part, Kadi could not stand seeing Hella degraded in such fashion. And both of them were bothered by Hella’s tears—Hella, who always before had held back her emotions. The result was that they did begin to think seriously about the Riedes returning to Wittenau—as preposterous and dangerous as that might be.
For the next few weeks the Wirkuses inspected every possible place from which a Gestapo agent might be watching their house. By the end of that time they were almost positive that they weren’t being observed. But there was another problem. Robert Jerneitzig, their landlord, who had recently been called into the army, had written to tell them that he wanted the Riedes out of the house. His letter was unequivocal. “It’s time,” he wrote. “It’s getting too dangerous.”
Jerneitzig’s letter swept away the last remnant of Beppo’s and Kadi’s indecision. “We have said A, and now we must say B,” Beppo responded. “It was you who brought them to us, and now it is you who want to send them away. Where is the logic in that?”
Beppo waited ten days for a reply. When he received none he decided that Jerneitzig’s silence was indication of his acquiescence. As soon as he could, he got in touch with the Riedes and told them to come back. Beppo made them promise, however, as a condition of their tenancy, that they would not leave the house during the day. Since the entrance to the bathroom was outside the house, they were to use a pail to relieve themselves. Kadi would empty the pail after each use.
But the major new safeguard was a hiding place to be used if and when the Gestapo reappeared. It was in the attic, behind a false wall that separated the storage area from a much larger empty space. From the storage area the wall looked sturdy enough, but it could easily be moved aside and then replaced from the other side once the Riedes were behind it.
Beppo had calculated that it would take between seven and ten minutes for either him or Kadi to leave the house, walk down the path to the gate, open it, talk to whoever was there and go back up the path to the house, where, presumably, the ground floor would be searched first. During that time Kurt and Hella would have to gather up all their belongings, go through a blind door to the attic, remove the wall, get themselves and their belongings on the other side and replace the wall. For the first few days after their arrival he insisted that the Riedes practice the evacuation drill until they could accomplish it silently in well under seven minutes. At unannounced times Beppo even went out to the gate and rang the bell and then timed the Riedes. Within a few days the Riedes were able to vanish in less than five minutes.
The two couples would have liked to regain their old esprit, and they tried hard to do so. But a new knowledge hung over them like a massive weight suspended from a thread. Someone out there knew the truth. He had decided to spare them, in all probability, because of a physical response to Hella—a whim as weak as a thread.
IV
DELIVERANCE
35
BY SUMMER’S END it was evident that the war was effectively over. The Russian summer offensives had carried the Red Army all the way to the border of East Prussia. Rumania fell to the Russians, which meant the loss of Germany’s only source of natural oil. Paris, four years in enemy hands, was liberated on August 25. What was left of the German armies in France was streaking back to German soil. British and Canadian troops led by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery liberated Belgium and took Antwerp intact, giving the Allies a fabulous port through which to pour invasion supplies. Five hundred thousand German soldiers, half of them prisoners, were lost to the defense of the Reich. Their equipment was lost as well. Only a maniac would believe that Germany could still win the war. But just such a maniac still ruled the Reich.
Hans and Marushka knew everything, thanks in part to the BBC, but also to their friends. They had learned of the July 20 attempt on Hitler’s life within hours after it occurred, and of the prompt execution of the plotters. The attempt, coupled with the defeats, had an unmistakable portent. As the air grew crisp and the city’s forests blazed their farewell to the summer season, the lovers could not help but believe that the hostilities must soon end.
The more the city suffered, the more optimistic they became. Inevitably the surge of spirit translated into a desire on Hans’s part to get permanently out of his jail. To his astonishment and delight, Marushka agreed. The source of her confidence regarding Hans had nothing to do with the news, however; it had to do with a new piece of identity obtained for Hans through a friend of Werner Keller’s. The paper identified Hans as an investigator for the authority in charge of the defense of Berlin. Everyone—the army, the bureaucracy, even the Nazi party—was to assist him in whatever manner he requested.
“Do you think there’s any danger?” Hans asked when he first read the paper.
“Not the slightest,” Marushka said. “Just be tough. Order people about.”
Hans could hardly wait to try out the paper. The chance came even sooner than he had expected. The first chilly weather set Marushka to thinking of a fur coat she had stashed at the home of a friend in the country. There was no way she could absent herself from her duties long enough to get it. “What do you think?” she asked Hans one evening. “Are you game?”
On the train the following afternoon Hans did not even bother to look up from his copy of the Völkischer Beobachter as he handed the controller his paper. The controller read the paper, bowed, clicked his heels and walked on. At the station where he stopped to change trains Hans presented the paper in the restaurant and was immediately served a meal. When he reached his destination he was furnished a car and driver for the ride to the house of Marushka’s friend. Back in Berlin, he was once again offered a car to drive him home. No, he said, he wanted to stretch his legs. He took a long, circuitous route until he was certain that he wasn’t being followed. Only then did he return triumphantly to the flat.
The flat at this point had a theatrical look about it, almost as though it had been designed as a setting for a stage play about life in wartime Berlin, and specifically about life in an apartment that looked as though it had been hit by a bomb—which, of course, was almost exactly what had happened. The beam that had been installed to prop up the ceiling the previous fall, when a bomb destroyed all of the building with the exception of Marushka’s apartment and the one above it, was still in place. Since then a thin sheet of plywood had been slipped in between the top of the pole and the ceiling in order to keep loose bits of material from falling to the floor. Nonetheless little bits of plaster were scattered about each morning, shaken loose by the nightly reverberations of the bombs.
After the direct hit on their building, the building’s porter, who had lived in the flat above, had declared it uninhabitable and had found quarters elsewhere. The flat had been taken over by a Polish family that until then had been literally without a roof to sleep under. Having any kind of home in those days was all that mattered, as the incessant bombings destroyed more and more of the city’s buildings. Marushka’s flat sheltered a continuous stream of itinerants—as well as two new, totally unexpected residents, whose arrival changed Hans’s and Marushka’s lives.
One day, a nurse who had once looked after the babies of one of Marushka’s sisters came calling on Marushka with a special purpose in mind. She was trying to find a home for two Russian girls who had been part of a contingent of children brought from Russia in the aftermath of the German invasion and placed in a children’s camp. Now the camp was being broken up because it was no longer possible to maintain it, and the children were being placed with good Nazi families who would be willing to shelter and feed them in exchange for their services. Most of the children had been placed, the nurse reported, but two of them were proving to be a problem. They were sisters, one thirteen, the other seven, and they refused to be separated. The thirteen-year-old could work, but her seven-year-old sister was just another mouth to feed. No one would take them, the nurse told Marus
hka. Would she?
“I’ll have to think about it,” Marushka said.
As soon as the nurse left, Hans emerged from the bedroom, where he had been hiding. “For God’s sake, let’s take them,” he said. “They’ll be gassed if no one wants them.”
It was not so simple. There were forms to be filled out and an approval from the Gestapo to be obtained. Four weeks later the approval came through. Marushka went to a building near the Alexanderplatz that appeared to overflow with children. It was there that she first laid eyes on Tamara and Lucie Geroschewicz.
She had never encountered more suspicious children. Where were they being taken, they demanded to know. They did not wish to lose touch with their friends. And would they remain together? If they were not to remain together now, they simply refused to go. Tamara, small for her age but surprisingly ample, and obviously bright and lively, spoke a little German. She translated for Lucie, the seven-year-old, who looked like a Tatar. It took a little convincing, but after collecting their papers, Marushka finally persuaded the girls to accompany her to the flat.
The smile on Hans’s face when the girls walked in the door was almost beatific. “I’ve made you a pudding,” he announced. He had made it of flour and flavored it with orange and saccharin, much too much saccharin as it turned out, but the girls wolfed it down, and when no more could be obtained with a spoon, ran their fingers around the bowls.
“I think I’ll heat some water,” Marushka said as the girls romped with the dogs. When the water was hot, she and Hans led the girls to the bath, stripped them and put them in the tub. Marushka washed Tamara, and Hans took care of Lucie. The girls hadn’t been washed since they had been in the camp. Their brown, curly hair was filled with lice, and their bodies were covered with scabietic bites. “I’ve never seen anything so dirty,” Hans said as he set about scrubbing Lucie. He had to shout to make himself heard over Lucie’s screams.
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