The children watched in silence, not really understanding how or why their own Russians had caused Marushka so much grief. Hans could understand it, but he was not able to do much about it. He was certain it would do no good to point out that she had always known it would happen; this was not an event that submitted to any rational analysis.
At last Marushka stopped crying. But then she began to pace back and forth in the small living room, the Scotch terriers pacing behind her. For more than an hour she paced, the dogs always at her heel, until Hans said at last, “Please sit down.” Words unspoken were conveyed in that remark: that this was land lost, after all, not lives; that there were more significant losses to mourn; that she, at least, had not had a mother exterminated by the Nazis. Marushka knew exactly what was implied, but she had neither the heart nor the strength to reply.
The next day a friend, Gregor Zivier, did it for her. He had come to console her after learning the news. It would have been evident even to a stranger that Hans and Marushka were at odds, but Zivier knew them so well he could also divine the problem. “Hans,” he said, “it’s not only the Jews. The Germans are suffering too. People are at the front who didn’t want this war. Their families are being bombed. You can’t suppose that one side is suffering and the other side has a lovely life. Marushka has lost family too. You’re not well, but look at her. She looks like death.”
They sat in silence then, unable to continue, knowing that this was an argument without a winning side.
39
THE THREE MONTHS since Erik Perwe’s death had been a time of almost unbearable pain and strain for Erik Myrgren as he awakened to the realities of Nazi genocide and his own responsibilities to oppose it. Even the stories told him by the distraught Jews who had stolen into the church through back alleys or during the air raids or under cover of darkness had scarcely prepared him for what he was subsequently to learn about the church’s involvement in the labyrinth of clandestine work.
The young pastor of the Swedish church in Berlin had not come by the knowledge automatically. Only Erik Wesslen, the church’s go-between with helpful Gestapo contacts, knew the entire story, and Wesslen’s first response to Myrgren had not been open at all. He liked the young folk-singing priest well enough as a lively addition to the staff, but taking him on as a partner in the game of life and death he played each day was another matter. In Perwe, Wesslen had had a tested ally with the commitment, poise and experience to carry off his masquerade. In Myrgren he sensed a youthful, joyous spirit that had not yet been tempered by the realities of Nazi Germany, a mind that despite the accumulating evidence, still resisted the idea that such bestiality could exist in modern times. His capacity for discretion, his stamina and resources, his reserves of courage, his commitment to helping others, even his abilities and intelligence—all of these were unknowns. More than that, his knowledge of the operation was nil. Small wonder that in the days after Perwe’s death Wesslen was upset and wary, and reluctant to impart secret knowledge to his successor.
And yet he would have to do it. Erik Myrgren, scarcely out of the seminary, was now the titular head of the parish, through whose authority—and only through whose authority—the operation could continue, because he controlled the supplies on which the operation existed. Those supplies were the coin of Wesslen’s barter with his contacts in the Gestapo; they could not be dispensed without the parish priest’s approval.
Wesslen watched Myrgren closely in those first bewildering days after news of the crash had reached them, and was, perversely, encouraged by what he saw. Myrgren’s flashing smile almost vanished. The sparkle dimmed in his eyes. As he shouldered the sorrows of more and more Jews, he seemed, like a weight lifter, to gain muscle under those added burdens.
Personal factors too worked to gain Wesslen’s trust. Myrgren was much closer to Wesslen’s age than Perwe had been; for both young Swedes the responsibility that fell to them seemed more awesome and intoxicating than it might for older, more seasoned men. Then too their memories of Sweden were those of contemporaries. And they shared a mutual passion for botany which they indulged when they could—Myrgren, the frustrated naturalist, Wesslen, the would-be landscape architect, whose studies had initially brought him to Berlin. Together they marveled at the innate grace and natural beauty of the city that somehow survived the bombings, the lakes and parks and forests with their thick stands of birch trees so reminiscent of home. Such comparisons would catch them off guard, provoking sighs and silence and far-off looks.
But talk of home and plant life and the problems of young men was reserved—once Myrgren had gained Wesslen’s trust—for their rare, precious moments of repose. What they spoke about at their meetings in the church each morning was far more serious—the art of exchanging goods for lives.
Wesslen taught Myrgren everything that Erik Perwe had known. The young pastor learned how to swap liquor and money—both of which the church seemed to have in abundance for this work—for such provisions as gas and coal, which were needed if the church was to continue to operate. He learned how to obtain ration cards and false documents for the illegals. Using the records of Swedes born of Swedish parents in Berlin, Myrgren could literally create a past for an illegal. A Jewish woman of thirty-five came to him one day in the second month of his tenure, clearly exhausted from hiding herself for almost two years, and with no place to hide any longer. “Can’t you counterfeit some kind of identity for me?” she begged.
“Oh, yes,” Myrgren replied. He searched the church’s baptismal records for a girl born of Swedish parents thirty-five years before. Then he made certain that neither the child nor her parents were still in Berlin. Finally he wrote out an attestation, using all the details of the former residents’ histories. The woman promptly took the attestation to a district in which all records had been destroyed and received a new identity card.
Part of Myrgren’s education was in learning to determine which of the persons coming to him for help were Jews and which were Gestapo plants. As a student of the Old Testament he knew an enormous amount not only about the history of the Jews but about Jewish religious practices. He was able to use this knowledge to excellent advantage. First he would ask the petitioners routine questions, such as where they were born, what their parents’ names had been, and whether they practiced Judaism. Then he would ease into some simple questions about Jewish history.
One day Myrgren received a visit from a tall light-haired man who said he was an underground Jew but whom Myrgren immediately suspected of being a Gestapo agent. For fifteen minutes the pastor questioned the visitor. It was obvious from his answers that he wasn’t a Jew.
“Why are you here?” the pastor asked at last.
The visitor said he had come looking for a friend; the name he gave was one Myrgren had never heard before. “I don’t know him,” he said.
“May I stay a while? Perhaps he’ll appear.”
“No, he won’t. And you may not.”
Much of Myrgren’s knowledge of Hitler’s Germany was acquired through his contact with its suffering victims. But the most graphic lesson of all came one evening at Christmas time and was delivered by a German visitor.
He came in late and unannounced, a man of fifty, with a matter-of-fact manner. He said that he had been a friend of Erik Perwe’s. He owned a factory that manufactured brushes. He had many Jews working in the factory under false identities, he confided. All of them were blind. Then he came to the purpose of his visit. He told the young pastor that he had been asked to bid on a contract to provide brushes for a number of concentration camps. Not being familiar with the needs of the camps, he had asked the authorities for permission to visit them. The permission was granted, but when he got to the camps he had to content himself with interviews with the people in charge. He was never permitted to inspect the facilities. Finally at one camp he became acquainted with a garrulous sergeant, who told him what was happening. Jews were being gassed to death. Their teeth were then extracted and heated to m
elt out the gold. Their bones were ground for fertilizer, and their fat was converted to soap. The factory processing the bodies used up more than two hundred Jews a day, the sergeant said.
For several minutes after he had told his story the brush manufacturer sat in silence with the Swedish minister.
“Why are you telling me? What do you want me to do?” Myrgren said at last.
“I would like you to spread the word that this is happening,” the brush manufacturer said. “I would like you to get word to Sweden. Perhaps if you can tell someone, the facts will be publicized.” He paused for a moment. “For whatever you can do, I thank you,” he said. The he rose and left.
Myrgren did not get up. He was not certain that he could. He felt pressed against his chair by an enormous weight. He knew that a part of his life had just ended.
Half an hour passed before he forced himself from the chair. Time to start, he thought. He went into the hall to look for Wesslen. He would tell Wesslen the story. And then, between them, they would have to come up with a way to move more Jews to Sweden.
For months now, persons with any claim to Swedish identity had been petitioning the Swedish legation for evacuation to Sweden. Few of them had the necessary papers, but members of the legation staff were more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They began to issue emergency passports without the legation minister’s knowledge. It was only one step further to issue provisional passports to German Jews—some known personally to them, others vouched for by Erik Myrgren and Erik Wesslen—and to send these Jews, one by one, along with the Swedish-Germans, to Lübeck, where, if all went well, they would board a ship for Sweden. But the risk of discovery was great; the Nazis made random checks on the passports, and the process was maddeningly slow. Myrgren, with Wesslen’s help, kept searching for opportunities to send a group of Jews out at once.
A possibility appeared in February 1945, when Count Folke Bernadotte, vice-president of the Swedish Red Cross, arrived in Berlin on a complex mission. Bernadotte hoped to persuade the Germans to let the Red Cross evacuate all Scandinavians held in concentration camps. He proposed to do this with a fleet of buses and trucks that would be shipped from Sweden to Germany. Bernadotte had a secondary objective, which was to evacuate, as well, many hundreds of German citizens of Swedish origin, most of them the wives and children of German men who had been killed or were missing in action. Some Swedish-born Germans had already succeeded in getting out, and the stories they told on their arrival in Stockholm—of air-pressure bombs that could kill people in shelters even without a direct hit; of Germans, their shoes torn away by the blasts, wrapping their feet in newspapers; of young men strung from lampposts by the S.S., with signs around their necks saying “He didn’t fight hard enough,” or “He left too soon”—as well as the sapped and frightened and disheveled look of the refugees themselves, had created strong public sentiment for a bolder evacuation program.
Bernadotte was a man well suited to his mission. He had the bearing and cultivation of an aristocrat, but he was at heart an unpretentious man with enormous compassion and inexhaustible patience. He was also a keen observer and, most important, an optimist who believed in human decency. He would need all of those qualities, for he would be dealing with Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the S.S. and Gestapo as well as the German police system, Minister of the Interior, Commander in Chief of the Home Army and commander of the regular German armies fighting the Russians on the Oder River front—“the man who,” Bernadotte would later observe in his memoirs, The Curtain Falls (1945), “by means of his terror system had stained politics with crime in a manner hitherto unknown and who, by means of this very system, had up to now held the tottering Third Reich upright.” Small, ascetic, with a receding chin and an enigmatic smile, Himmler was mindful of his reputation as history’s most productive executioner, a fact borne out by his conversational references as well as two classical psychological signs of guilt—chronic stomach cramps and a hand-washing compulsion. The second most powerful man in the Reich, Himmler was devoted to Hitler and his objective, particularly to the perpetuation of the “master race,” although he himself was the physical antithesis of the model “Aryan.”
Himmler’s initial reactions to Bernadotte’s proposals were negative. He became particularly heated when Bernadotte suggested that the Norwegians and Danes in the camps be moved to Sweden and placed under custody there. “If I were to agree to your proposal,” he said, “the Swedish papers would announce with big headlines that the war criminal Himmler, in terror of punishment for his crimes, is trying to buy his freedom.” He was less emotional but no less hostile in regard to Bernadotte’s second proposal. “I don’t feel inclined to send German children to Sweden. There they will be brought up to hate their country, and spat at by their playmates because their fathers were German.” When Bernadotte pointed out that German fathers would be comforted to know that their children were safe in Sweden, Himmler replied, “Their fathers would no doubt much rather see them grow up in a shack in Germany than have them given refuge in a castle in a country which is so hostile to Germany as Sweden is.”
But Himmler soon changed his mind, possibly because the idea for a negotiated peace with the West had already taken root in his mind and he saw Bernadotte as the logical go-between. In any case, he sent word to Bernadotte that Swedish women were to receive exit visas. If any of these women had been in trouble with the police and might as a consequence not receive their visas, he would personally review the matter.
Bernadotte returned to Sweden to prepare his expedition. Within a few weeks he was back again with buses, troop carriers, mobile field kitchens, ambulances and 250 volunteers. Their principal work was to move Norwegian and Danish prisoners to a camp near Hamburg, as a preliminary to evacuation, but by mid-March they were also assisting in the evacuation of the Swedish-born women and their children. In Berlin the assembly point for the operation was the Swedish church on the Landhausstrasse. In the crush of people one morning the figure of Officer Mattek was scarcely noticeable. Slowly he made his way to the church, where he found Erik Myrgren, and led him to a corner. “There’s no Gestapo control today,” he said softly. “If you want to send some Jews out on the buses, do it.”
Quickly the pastor went to the cellar and spoke to half a dozen Jews, one of whom, Erik Jacob, had lived in the church for a year. When the buses rolled out an hour later the six Jews were on them.
In the basement later that day Myrgren saw his friends the Weissenbergs. They had lived in the church now for nearly two years. They would have liked to be on a bus, but they were unwilling to risk the trip without papers. They did not want Myrgren to see their depression, but they weren’t very good actors.
“Don’t worry,” the pastor said, “you’ll be next. We’ve got a plan for you.”
In mid-March the younger son of Robert Jerneitzig, the greengrocer who had befriended the Riedes two years before, contracted diphtheria. A fortnight later he was dead. Jerneitzig received a leave of absence from his unit to return to Berlin for the funeral. After the funeral he brought his wife and second son to Wittenau and informed the Wirkuses and Riedes that he was deserting.
That night Beppo and Jerneitzig burned the grocer’s uniform and papers, then buried the charred remnants in a compost heap in the garden. The next day, after a restless night in the overcrowded house, Jerneitzig went to stay with a friend in Helmstedt. But two days later he was back for good.
So now Beppo and Kadi were harboring four Jews—Kurt and Hella Riede and Hella’s parents, the Papendicks—and a deserter. It never occurred to either of them that there was anything else to do. They tried their best to arrange comfortable sleeping annexes in the cellar and the corridor.
March 30 was Good Friday. That morning Erik Wesslen received a telephone call from the Gestapo directing him to appear for questioning by the end of the day. He said he would come. Then he put the phone down slowly and carefully and stared at it for a long time.
H
e’d been expecting the call for months. Considering the work he’d done to save Jews and others from the Nazis, it was a miracle that it hadn’t come before this. He’d hoped that if and when the call did come, he wouldn’t lose control. Too many people were dependent on him for him to be able to indulge his emotions. He tried now to think of his problem as systematically as he had thought through all of his rescue efforts and black market arrangements and bribing of the right people in the Gestapo and S.S. But in spite of his efforts to maintain control, he had the distinct feeling that a linchpin had been pulled from his body and it would disassemble into a thousand parts if he so much as moved.
He was still at his desk twenty minutes later when Myrgren found him. The pastor, who had just finished the regular 11:00 A.M. service, was wearing his Swedish clergyman’s dress, a black gown that reached to his feet and a stiff white collar with two linen tabs hanging beneath his chin. That morning he had preached on the passion and death of Christ, citing the suffering and disasters that the wickedness of men had inflicted on all mankind. The sight of the pastor, whose work in the last four months had removed all his initial doubts, served now to release all of Wesslen’s blocked emotions. Quickly he blurted his story.
Myrgren sat down heavily and stared at Wesslen. “It must be Okhardt,” he said at last.
Okhardt was a young German connected with the resistance who had been sent to the church by Countess von Maltzan. Myrgren and Wesslen had found a safe house for him with the help of Reuter, the church’s caretaker.
Now the two men regarded each other in silence, both of them with the same thought: What would happen if the Gestapo tortured Wesslen in an effort to make him talk? Would he? Would the church and its allies such as the countess and all of the Jews and other refugees sequestered in homes around Berlin be exposed so late in the game, when it was almost won? Four months earlier it had been the pastor’s courage that Wesslen had questioned. Now it was his own. Suddenly he was shaking. “I’m finished,” he said softly.
The Last Jews in Berlin Page 28
