The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  The apartment building, built on a slim triangle of land, was shaped like a ship, its narrow bow at the point where two diagonal streets converged. The two wings of the building fanned out from that point. In the basement the wings were separated by a thick wall. The Germans were holed up on the other side, and would have to be blasted out, the officer explained. He shook his head once more. “I don’t think you’ll see your mother again,” he said.

  “Oh, my God!” Ruth cried. She reached out to the officer to keep from falling. Then she saw some neighbors. “My mother! Have you seen my mother?”

  A woman told her she had heard someone yelling on the other side of the wall. “It could have been your mother,” she said.

  For Ruth the next hour was the longest of the war. She waited, helpless, while the Russians blasted the Germans from the other side of the basement. She had never been this close to fighting or gunfire in her life. The noise shook her bones. Her teeth chattered. Her body was clammy with sweat. The roof of her mouth was dry. Every explosion reverberated in her head and sent stabs of pain down her back. But the physical response was as nothing compared to the fear that her mother was on the other side of that wall, meeting the same fate as the Germans. When the fighting stopped, Ruth clambered over the rubble and, heart hammering, searched among the bodies. Mother wasn’t there.

  As the Russians moved on, Ruth moved with them, believing that her only chance to survive a battle that had suddenly begun to ebb and flow was to remain with the side she was sure would eventually win. Then suddenly it was quiet. Ruth left the last building in which she’d taken refuge and began to walk the streets. She could not begin to count the bodies.

  She had lost all sense of time. She did not know what day it was, let alone the hour. Nor did she know where she was, or how to get back to her apartment. Even if she had known, she would not have attempted to get there. The situation was still too fluid, and, besides, what was the point of returning? Her mother was lost. What a ghastly joke! Twelve years of escalating horror, thirty months of illegality—all of this she had pulled Mother through, only to lose her on the verge of liberation.

  A chill wind was blowing through the streets, pushing along swirls of brick and plaster dust. Petals from the blooming fruit trees were mixed incongruously with the dust, and the perfume from the blooms lent a fragrance to the smell of the fires, a fragrance obliterated from time to time by the smell of death.

  The war seemed to have passed Ruth by. In the distance she could hear the booming of the big guns, the pat pat pat of strafing and the popping of flak, but the area in which she was walking was calm, for the moment at least. Some of the Russians were setting up their bivouacs in abandoned yards, under the blooming fruit trees. She could hear their voices and their clanging mess kits and, far in the distance, a melody from an accordion.

  Exhausted, Ruth crept into an abandoned house and hid under a bed, where she promptly fell asleep. When she awakened she had no idea how long she’d been there. She felt faint from hunger. When she could stand it no longer she ventured into the street.

  Several miles away, the city was on fire. She thought it must be the center of the city, where Hitler’s bunker was located. The city center was southwest of Pankow, she knew, so now she had a better idea of where she was. Some Russian soldiers gave her some food. When she had finished eating she returned to the house and hid again, making certain that no one saw her enter.

  In the morning it was so quiet that Ruth could hear a water pump handle squeaking somewhere nearby. She peeked out a window. The street was filled with people, all of them with white bandages and handkerchiefs wrapped around their arms. They looked gray and wrinkled and tired beyond remedy.

  Ruth left the house and began walking in the direction of the fire she had seen the night before, which still cast a pink glow against the grayness of the sky. Her slow gait did not even quicken when the surroundings began to look familiar.

  At last she reached her apartment building. It took her several minutes to mount the five flights of stairs. Beaten, defeated, she opened the door and walked inside.

  There sat her mother.

  A sob escaped Ruth’s lips. She rushed to her and embraced her and let her tears cascade. When at last she quieted, her mother explained: She’d gotten lost, but had returned to the apartment the moment the battle ended, and had been waiting there ever since.

  In the distance they could hear the fighting, but for Ruth and her mother the war was finally over.

  They all heard the clumping boots at the same time. Some soldiers, two at least, had entered the courtyard, and now they were mounting the stairs. Hans rose at once and was about to speak when Marushka put a finger to her lips. She went to the drawer of her writing desk and got her pistol, the one given her by Borker, the racist army major. Hans came over. “Let me go,” he whispered.

  Marushka shook her head.

  “Then wait until Brumm gets back,” Hans insisted.

  Again Marushka shook her head. Brumm had gone out two hours before to look for food. By the time he returned—if he returned—the soldiers upstairs might have gotten them all killed. “I’ll get the Polish boy,” Marushka whispered.

  She crept up the stairs to the bombed-out flat in which the Polish family had taken shelter and found the boy. He was not more than sixteen, but he was big and strong and not at all afraid. She motioned for him to follow her.

  They found the soldiers in a corner of the building, setting up a machine gun post. With all the firing going on, their own footsteps could not be heard. When they were two feet from the soldiers Marushka shouted, “Throw up your hands.” The soldiers were too startled to do anything but that. “Now turn around,” she ordered. They did. They were S.S. men, both of them in their early twenties, with blond hair and nice features. “I’m not going to have this house shot up. I’m just not going to have it,” she told them. “I’ll give you your choice. You can give me your weapons and your uniforms and stay with us, or you can be shot right here and now. Which will it be?”

  “You can’t give up!” one of them shouted back. “You can’t win the war if you give up!” The other nodded his agreement.

  “You stupid idiots, the war is lost. Now come on and make up your minds.”

  For another moment the soldiers struggled with themselves. Then simultaneously their bodies seemed to be drained of adrenaline and their faces to show relief, as though someone had forced them to a decision they had wanted to make but had been incapable of making alone. Marushka and the Polish boy marched them to the cellar, took their uniforms from them and locked them up. The Polish boy took the uniforms to the courtyard and burned them.

  An hour later the first Russian came walking up the street. He was carrying a light-colored sun umbrella. A moment later another soldier appeared, and then the armored vehicles. All of them—including Brumm, who had sneaked back into the house with some bread he had managed to find—stood at the boarded-over window and looked through the cracks.

  “Let me go out,” Tamara said. “I’ll talk to them.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Marushka volunteered.

  In the street Tamara strolled up to one of the tanks. “Hello,” she called out in Russian. “I’m a Russian child.” Heads popped from the tanks. “I’m staying with good German people. They’re against Hitler.”

  One of the Russians called back to a comrade, who turned and called to another. “They’re getting an officer,” Tamara explained. He came forward in a moment, a tall man in his early thirties, an incredulous look on his face. Tamara repeated her story. The officer said something to the soldiers. Several of them dismounted with cans of food in their hands.

  There was nothing for Marushka to do but invite them in. “This is my adopted father,” Tamara explained as Hans came forward. “He is a Jew.”

  And then Brumm came in from the bedroom. At the sight of him the soldiers stirred. “And this is the nephew of my mother,” Tamara said quickly. “He’s got consumption
.” As if on cue, Brumm began to cough into a spotted handkerchief. To a man, the Russian soldiers all drew back. “My mother was frightened that if she sent her nephew to a sanitarium, the Nazis would kill him. So she kept him home,” Tamara added quickly.

  The Russians seemed satisfied with that explanation and turned their attention to their breakfast. Besides the meat they had brought loaves of black bread. While Marushka made tea a Russian excused himself and returned a few minutes later with a bottle of brandy. The Russians refused to drink. Marushka drank a tumbler straight.

  Fifteen minutes later the Russians left. The girls ran to Brumm and danced him around the room and then out into the kitchen. Hans and Marushka stood alone in the living room. For a moment neither of them spoke.

  “It’s over,” Hans said at last.

  “Come on,” Marushka said, “let’s go out on the street.” She hesitated. “But first shave off that horrible beard.”

  Laughing, Hans went off to the bathroom.

  For twelve days Fritz Croner had hidden in the cellar storage room of the flat at Bayerische Strasse 5, carefully rationing out the bottles of boiled water he had put up for this period, quietly sneaking into the garden each night to relieve himself. Not once had he gone to his flat, or even to the basement shelter used by Marlitt, Lane and the other tenants, for fear he might be caught by the military patrols looking for deserters, or by his eventual liberators, who, despite his protests, might shoot him as a Nazi.

  Nor did these possibilities represent the only danger. The focus of the fighting was the Olivaer Platz, not fifty meters from their building. The explosions of bombs and shells rocked the building. Snipers were everywhere, shooting at any form or movement suddenly visible through any window.

  Fritz spent the days sitting or lying on a mattress he had dragged into the cellar storage space two weeks earlier. He existed on canned food and the boiled water he had put up in fifty bottles. At night he crept into the small garden in the back of the building, where, in other times, the women of the building had hung their laundry to dry. One night he found twelve dead Germans lying on the grass.

  And then, one morning at last, Fritz was awakened by silence. For almost an hour he waited, not trusting his senses. Finally he crept up the cellar steps and, scarcely daring to breathe, went cautiously outside and stood on the steps of the building. There were Russians in the streets. Without taking his eyes from the soldiers he silently said a prayer. Then a Russian, obviously an officer, approached. “Soldiers?” he said in German, pointing into the building.

  “No,” Fritz said. “Only an old man.” He did not know if he was understood, but he went on. “I am a Jew. I want to thank you.” The Russian shook his head and shrugged; he obviously didn’t understand. So Fritz repeated the words he had found in a Russian-German dictionary in anticipation of this moment. “I am a Jew,” he said in German.

  The officer shook his head, and now he spoke in broken German. “No. Jews. Germany. Dead.”

  Carefully Fritz raised a hand to his shirt and unbuttoned it. Then, slowly, he reached beneath the shirt and pulled out his undershirt, to which he had pinned his Jewish identity card—once again, in anticipation of this moment.

  The officer looked at the card incredulously. “You’re really a Jew?” he said suddenly in Yiddish.

  “I told you so,” Fritz said when he had recovered from his astonishment.

  The Russian grinned at him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out several watches. “Here,” he said, handing a gold one to Fritz, “have a watch.”

  Then Fritz turned and walked swiftly back into the building and down to the shelter. “The Russians are here,” he announced to the other tenants.

  Fritz took Marlitt and Lane immediately to the flat. They hid there for several hours, hoping that if the Russians came looking for women, they would find what they wanted in the cellars and not bother looking in the flats. But there were no longer any Russians in the streets when Fritz finally peered outside, only dead and dying German soldiers and dead and dying horses.

  At last Fritz opened the window. A warm and fragrant breeze immediately flowed into the room. Lane came over to the window. “Oh, Uncle Fritz, it’s so nice outside,” she said.

  Fritz put his hands on Lane’s shoulders and turned her to him. “I’m not your Uncle Fritz,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “I’m your father. From now on you can call me Papa.”

  Lane thought for a moment, and then she nodded. She did not seem in the least surprised.

  They waited for another hour, watching the sunny street. There was no movement and no sound, except for an occasional low moan from a dying man or horse. At last Fritz said to Marlitt, “Let’s go. I want to show people that we’re living. I want to tell myself that we’re free.”

  They walked from the building and into the street and then down the street, stepping around the bodies, Fritz on the right, Marlitt on the left, and Lane between them, holding onto their hands.

  AFTERWORD

  ON LIBERATION DAY, Fritz Croner made a pilgrimage to the apartment of Frau Kosimer, his “Catholic” benefactress, to thank her once again for hiding him and his family the night they went underground, only to learn that she herself was a Jew who had lived on false papers throughout the war.

  On May 4, 1945, two days after the fighting had stopped in Berlin, Russian troops set fire to the Swedish church on the Landhausstrasse. Erik Myrgren, Erik Wesslen, Vide Ohmann and other members of the church staff spent the next several weeks in the Swedish legation alongside the Tiergarten and were then evacuated to Sweden via Russia.

  In mid-May several Russian soldiers seized Tamara Geroschewicz, the thirteen-year-old Russian ward of Hans Hirschel and Countess Maria von Maltzan, dragged her to a bombed-out flat above the countess’ apartment, and raped her. Alerted by Lucie Geroschewicz, Tamara’s younger sister, the countess summoned a passing Russian officer, who accosted the soldiers as they emerged from the building. The soldiers were quickly arrested, tried and executed by a firing squad.

  Within the month Makarow, the white Russian who had befriended Fritz Croner throughout the war, was arrested by the Russians and deported to the Soviet Union. He was never heard from again. Nor were other persons whose deportations were related in this account: Fritz Croner’s parents and uncle; Hans Hirschel’s mother; Ruth Thomas’ husband; Kurt Riede’s mother and stepfather; Wilhelm Glaser’s mother; and Hans Rosenthal’s nine-year-old brother.

  Soon after the war ended, Wilhelm Glaser and Ruth Gomma were married, as were Hans Hirschel and Countess von Maltzan. The latter couple were divorced some years later, only to remarry each other a few years before Hirschel’s death in 1975.

  All of the other principals in this narrative were still alive in December 1980, and all but Joseph and Leokadia Wirkus were still living in Berlin. Hans Rosenthal, married and the father of two children, is West Germany’s best known television personality, the chief of entertainment for RIAS Berlin, master of ceremonies of numerous quiz shows, and the president of a soccer team. Fritz Croner has prospered as a jeweler and devotes much of his time to lecturing to youth groups about his own experiences and those of other Jews during the Hitler era. Ruth Thomas has pursued a wide range of interests since the war, including music and design. Wilhelm Glaser is retired, following many years as a merchant. Kurt Riede, also retired, lives in Frohnau, on the northern fringe of Berlin, with his wife, Hella. They have frequent reunions with the Wirkuses, who live in Düsseldorf, where Wirkus is a civil servant. Countess von Maltzan practices veterinary medicine in a ground-floor apartment a block from the Kurfürstendamm.

  One other party to this account continued to live in Berlin following the war—Stella Kübler, the “blond ghost,” whose work for the Gestapo accounted for the capture of hundreds of underground Jews. In 1946 Kübler appealed to the Jewish community of Berlin for help, on the grounds that she had been a victim of the Nazis. Recognized by a number of Jewish survivors, she was arrested by th
e Russians, tried and sentenced to ten years of forced labor. On her release in 1956 Kübler went to West Berlin, where she was again recognized, arrested, tried and sentenced to ten years of forced labor. But the sentence was overturned on the grounds of double jeopardy. Kübler, who reportedly still lives in Berlin, maintained throughout that she had been mistaken for another catcher.

  Exactly how many underground Jews were still alive in Berlin when the war ended is a matter of conjecture. In June of 1945 the Jewish community of Berlin placed the number at 1,123. But others suggest that the survivors could not have exceeded a few hundred.

  Whatever the correct number, it is tempting to ask how these few—less than one percent of the number of Jews in Berlin before Adolf Hitler took power—survived when so many others did not. What special qualities linked Fritz and Marlitt Croner, Hans Hirschel, Ruth Thomas and her mother, Anna Rosenthal, Wilhelm Glaser, Kurt and Hella Riede, and Hans Rosenthal? The answer is as obscure as the question is obvious. Certainly all of them wanted desperately to survive, but so, presumably, did all the Jews who perished. And certainly all of them had faith that they would somehow prevail in spite of the inhuman struggle that confronted them—but they were not the only Jews to have such faith. “Those who survived said they believed they would, and this belief undoubtedly sustained them,” Hans Rosenthal reflected in Berlin in 1978. “But how many of those who perished also believed they would survive?”

  There are, however, two questions that can be asked more profitably. The first is why the principals in this story did not leave Germany before it became impossible to do so. The second is why they elected to remain in Germany after the horror had ended. The questions are not unrelated.