The Last Jews in Berlin (31 page)

It did not take long to solve his business problem. Within a few weeks jewelers, most of them in uniform, were coming to the Bayerische Strasse apartment at the rate of one and two a day. They came ostensibly to see “Frau Krauser.” Fritz trusted them implicitly; he had known and dealt with all of them for years. In the jewelry trade the amounts of money involved were such that trust had to be either 100 percent or nothing. The jewelers came because, week after week, Fritz managed to have the best supply of jewels in Berlin. His source, unknown to anyone but Marlitt, was a courier for the Minister of Trade who, for a large commission, went back and forth each week between Amsterdam and Berlin. Fritz gave him 50,000 to 100,000 marks; he brought back English, Dutch and French gold coins, as well as gems.

The problem of shelter during the raids was something else again. Fritz would have to wait until all of the building's residents had gone to the main shelter in the cellar. Then he would sneak down the stairs and into that part of the
cellar in which the individual storage bins for each apartment were located. There he would sit and listen to the bombs and wonder what would happen if the building were hit. As buildings near theirs were demolished one by one, it became increasingly evident that he was pushing his luck.

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

B
Y 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 again 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

T
HE 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.