The Last Jews in Berlin (14 page)

But for once in Willy's life the hopes had been realized.

Fortunate people in fortunate times had known nothing but happiness in the garden house in which he now found himself, Willy reckoned. It was a wooden house situated on a huge piece of land in the middle of a forest a mile from Müggelheim, a village near Köpenick, on the southeast fringe of Berlin. The house had once belonged to a Jewish family named Schwerin that had had the good sense to emigrate in time to England. It was a summer house, without electricity or inside plumbing, and Willy was occupying it during a miserable winter. Yet it had been his salvation, that house, exactly the place he had had in mind as he ran away from the Gestapo on the morning of January 31, 1943. He knew the house, because it now belonged to a Christian friend, George Meier. It was to Meier's home in Berlin that Willy had gone on his first night as a fugitive.

Meier had sent him to the country house the following night. He had given Willy the keys, a small petroleum lamp and a supply of food and water. But Willy wasn't supposed to light the lamp except in a dire emergency, because the neighbors might see the light. Willy had risked the S-Bahn to Köpenick and then a bus to Müggelheim and then walked through the forest in the middle of the night until he found the house. The bed was damp, the water pump wasn't working, and the cold permeated his bones. But he couldn't light a fire, lest the neighbors see the smoke.

For three days he lived in the house without light or heat; when his supplies ran out he did without food and water. He tried desperately to control his urges until nightfall, when he could make the trip to the privy under cover of darkness. By the fourth day, when Meier came with a fresh supply of food and water, Willy was near despair. “It's like living in a dungeon,” he said. And yet they both knew that there was no alternative.

For weeks the isolation continued. One day, at last, Willy opened the door a crack. Outside the sun was shining. He crept out and walked around the property. The next day he repeated the excursion, and the day after that, each time venturing a little farther from the house. With success came boldness. One day he went out the garden gate and walked for twenty-five minutes until he was in the small village of Müggelheim. There he sat in a cafe and drank a cup of coffee. The next day he walked to Müggelheim and took a bus to Köpenick, a suburb-size community. Finally the day came when he ventured into Berlin itself. It was foolish, and he knew it, but he preferred the risk to the isolation.

His greatest fear was being caught in an air raid and having to go a shelter. Berlin was like a ghost town during air raids. Everyone was required to be off the streets; there was no vehicular traffic. It was the best of all times for the police patrols to tour the shelters in their constant search for criminals, deserters and underground Jews. Thus far, however, his luck had held; he hadn't been caught in a raid, no one had questioned him, and he was beginning to believe divine Providence was guarding him.

And then one day, just as the weather was warming up and the cottage was beginning to seem hospitable, Meier came to tell Willy that it was time for him to leave. The neighbors would be coming soon to use their country homes, and there was no way that he could be explained, particularly since many of them had known him from another time and knew that he was Jewish.

It was a bitter moment for Willy Glaser, but since he had already survived for three months as an illegal, he couldn't help but believe that he could survive still longer. All he needed was another place to go.

The trouble was that there was no other place to go.

12

T
HE QUESTION
of what to do with the orphan Hans Rosenthal when he suddenly reappeared in Berlin in March 1943 was not long in being answered. His Grandmother Agnes, to whom he appealed for help, found a refuge for him with a woman named Jauch, a small, delicate, middle-aged spinster who ran a tiny dress shop in a workers' neighborhood called Lichtenberg, on the east side of Berlin. She had bought dresses from Hans's mother. The dresses came originally from Frau Rosenthal's Christian aunt, a sister of Grandmother Agnes, who had a big job in a department store and always had extra dresses made when she ordered, so that she could give some to her niece for resale.

Frau Jauch's sole activity when she wasn't selling dresses was studying the Bible. The Bible, she said, had prophesied the evil incarnation of Hitler. The Bible also told her that the war would end in July of 1944, fourteen months hence. She lived in a tiny cottage behind her store in a neighborhood of cottages that had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing. Her cottage consisted of a combination bedroom-sitting room, a kitchen, and a five-by-six-foot shed beyond the kitchen. It was in this tiny annex that Hans had been living since his grandmother had brought him to Frau Jauch in March. Frau Jauch, who had mourned the passing of Hans's mother, had agreed at once to hide him.

His room contained a couch, a small table and a chair. It had no heat. The only time he was warm was in the evening, when Frau Jauch would pull aside the drapery that covered the door, open the door and let Hans out. It was then that she would also empty the chamber pot Hans had used during the day. He never went outside. He had remained indoors for three months.

Frau Jauch would give Hans portions of the Bible and the Psalms to read. She tried to persuade him that the Jews were the chosen people, an idea he found uncomfortable; all people, he believed, were equal.

When they spoke, which was rarely, they did so in the barest whispers, leaning next to each other's ears. But mostly they communicated by signs, because Frau Jauch was supposed to be living alone, and a passerby might become suspicious if he heard voices. They would eat their meals together in silence in the kitchen. Afterward they would remain together either in the kitchen or the sitting-bedroom, because two lamps for one person in a frugal neighborhood would make the neighbors wonder.

Hans kept Frau Jauch's sales records for her, which she needed to obtain new merchandise. It was a small enough way to show his gratitude. Not only was she hiding him and emptying his chamber pot without complaint, she was also sharing her ration cards with him. Frau Jauch had two hens, which gave them a small supply of eggs, and she kept rabbits, which she insisted Hans learn to kill. “If you don't,” she said in response to his initial squeamishness, “we won't have food to live on.” She would bring a rabbit to his room, and Hans would kill it there, then cut it open and dress it.

Three antifascist families in the neighborhood knew about Hans and brought Frau Jauch extra supplies of food. His grandmother also came from time to time with provisions. He never asked her about the family. He did not want to know about anyone, lest he be captured and tortured into revealing their whereabouts. Similarly, he prayed that his grandmother wouldn't talk to the others about him.

Every morning Frau Jauch brought Hans a copy of the
Morgenpost
, and he would read every word—a four-hour task—even though he was certain that the paper was filled with propaganda. Frau Jauch had bought him a map; from the dispatches in the newspaper he could mark the location of the fronts. As good a face as the stories tried to put on the battles, it was obvious that the German armies in Russia had either been stalled or actually pushed back. Outright German victories were proclaimed with less and less frequency; when there was one, Hans took it as a personal defeat, an extension of his imprisonment. But German victories meant only that the war would be prolonged; Hans never doubted that the Allies would ultimately win the war, or that he himself would survive.

He prayed often for his brother, little Gert, who had had polio at the age of two, and whose blood serum, following his complete and rapid recovery, had thereafter been given to other polio victims in the hope that whatever had cured him so quickly might also cure them. (His blood ceased to be “acceptable” after the passage by the Nazis in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws, which set forth the regulations by which the racial purity of “Aryans” was to be protected.) Gert had been ten when he was deported; Hans hadn't known then about the gas chambers. He prayed now that the rumors he had heard weren't true. Over and over again he chastised himself for not getting Gert out of that orphanage. Somehow he should have found a way. Again and again Hans prayed that after the war he would be reunited with his brother.

After the war he would do many things. First he would devote all of his time to finding and killing members of the S.S. The Nazis were murderers. They had started the war. They had killed the Jews. They did not deserve to live. Then he would go to the radio stations and broadcast to the German people, telling them that they must develop tolerance, that Jews were like other people. He would not leave Germany. He would stay and educate young Germans to democracy. He hated the Nazis. He could not hate the Germans. Right now a German woman was hiding him, feeding him, saving his life.

He could not understand the hatred of race. He spent hours wondering what was behind it, and other hours praying for the end of the war.

He slept lightly now. At the sound of footsteps he would awaken at once and grasp the knife he kept in his room. He quickly learned to distinguish between the footsteps of his neighbors and the jackboots of the Nazis.

13

S
INCE THE MORNING
after he had gone underground, early in December 1942, Fritz Croner, the resilient jeweler, had scoured the city for a sanctuary for himself, Marlitt and the baby, Lane, to replace the one he would have to give up on January 1. When the last days of December arrived and he had still found nothing, he felt that he had touched bottom. Perhaps, he told himself one morning, the time really had come for him and Marlitt to place Lane with a friendly German woman and surrender to the Gestapo.

And then that very morning the miracle happened.

Two hours later Fritz burst into their barren flat and took Marlitt into his arms. “I found a place!” he said.

She sagged against him. “Thank God!”

Quickly he told her the details. The “place” was not a flat but a store. He had rented it from a real estate agent, a non-Jew married to a Jewish woman. The agent knew that he and Marlitt were Jewish, but it didn't matter, because he didn't have to register them with the police. Only residents of apartments had to be registered. There was no registration requirement for those who rented stores, inasmuch as no one, presumably, lived in them.

The store was in Halensee, just beyond the western terminus of the Kurfürstendamm. The Croners moved in on January 1, 1943. There was only one bed, and a mattress for Lane, but its very improbability as a dwelling gave them added reassurance. Within a few days Fritz was able to secure a Telefunken radio, complete with short wave, and that brightened their lives even more.

Fritz told the caretaker of the building that he was an engineer stationed in Poland, and that his work brought him frequently back to Berlin. The caretaker accepted the story. But Fritz became restless. One hiding place didn't seem enough to him. He thought they needed two or three. They would be far safer if they could move around.

In late January he found a room in an apartment on the Mörchinger Strasse in Zehlendorf. He rented it under the name of Fritz Kramer. The woman from whom he sublet the room was paying 150 marks a month rent for the entire apartment; for his room—which he told her he planned to use only two or three days a week—she charged him 600 marks a month, even though she would rent the room to others when he wasn't there. Fritz didn't complain. When she asked him for his police registration, he told her that because he was in Berlin only a few days a week on business he wasn't required to have one. Had she believed his story, or had she reported him to the police? He couldn't know. He could only hope that she liked his rent enough to accept whatever risk was involved for herself in failing to report him.

Fritz and Marlitt agreed that it would be impossible to take Lane with them when they used the apartment in Zehlendorf. Someone would demand to know what a baby was doing with an itinerant merchant and his wife in a furnished room in Berlin. Why did not the mother and child remain at home? Where
was
home? And where were the papers to prove it? They still had no papers—and no convincing story for anyone more demanding than the landlady. And so they placed Lane with an old woman in Neukölln who had been recommended by others. Three times a week, Marlitt would go to Neukölln with food for the child. In addition they paid the woman 300 marks a month.

With Lane in safekeeping, and with two hiding places, Fritz was beginning to feel, if not secure, at least a little more comfortable.

And then, on February 4, 1943, Fritz Croner went to visit his parents at their apartment, only to learn that the event he had expected and dreaded since his own flight into illegality two months before had finally come to pass. That day the elder Croners had received an order to remain in their flat. They all knew what that meant: deportation. But no one had come. “Maybe tomorrow,” Willy Croner said.

It was difficult for Fritz to look at his father. How proud a German he had once been. He had fought for his country and been crippled in its behalf; a wound suffered in the battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia, fighting against the Russians, had permanently disabled his right knee. He had received a medal for heroism. When the Nazis came to power, Jews from the nearby villages came to him and asked, “What are you going to do? Are you going to leave?”

“Leave Germany?” Willy Croner scoffed. “What for? I have my Iron Cross.” Surely, Willy Croner believed, a man who had risked his life for the fatherland had nothing to fear.

Now, ten years later, the truth had worked like acid on Willy Croner's face, washing it of all illusion as well as the slightest sign of hope. It had been months since he had smiled. The pain that he wore so visibly worked doubly on Fritz. There was the empathy he felt for his father's suffering. There was also the devastating argument it raised against Fritz's own iron determination to survive.