Underground in Berlin (12 page)

‘I want you to do me a favour,’ Ernst Wolff told his cousin. ‘Now, in this of all terrible times, something has happened to us; my girlfriend is expecting, and only an abortion will help us.’

‘Well, for you I’d do any favour, but an abortion, no!’ said the cousin. ‘You’ll have me on the gallows!’ So the argument went on for a while, and in the end Ernst Wolff seemed to give in. He realised he was asking too much, he said. ‘But at least give us a certificate of pregnancy so that my parents will agree to our relationship and we can marry!’ So the gynaecologist made out a certificate to the effect that I was three months pregnant. It was no use, however; I still didn’t get official permission from the authorities to marry.

My relationship with Shu Ka Ling gradually petered out. When the group in his shared apartment went their separate ways, I found him a room in Blumenstrasse with a Frau Ury, who was living with a cousin of my father’s. Months later, I heard that my Chinese fiancé had begun a relationship with the daughter of the concierge of that apartment block.

*

At that time you usually had to be twenty-one before you came of age. But I didn’t want to wait until 4 April 1943: I wanted to assume responsibility for my own affairs before that. My guardian Moritz Jacoby agreed, and made the application for me. I allowed myself to make a joke before the guardianship tribunal. ‘I want to be officially of age because I’m sure that otherwise it will be difficult for me to correspond with my guardian, moving from one concentration camp to another.’ The judge thought this remark deeply embarrassing. He went red in the face and wanted to end the scene as quickly as possible. ‘Granted with immediate effect,’ he said brusquely, and with that he was rid of me.

Early in June 1942, I met Frau Nossek in the street. In the old days we always used to see this simple-minded household help, who worked alternately for my parents and for Grete, in the Old Synagogue on religious festivals. She always sat in one of the cheapest places in the second women’s gallery. After the service she would come over to us out in the yard to shake hands with everyone and wish us well.

Now Frau Nossek told me that she had already received her deportation order, and had been duly picked up with her rucksack and her bundle of bed linen. At the railway station, however, she had suffered such a bad attack of diarrhoea – which she described in all its embarrassing detail – that she had to go to the toilet. When she finally came out again (‘such bad luck’), the train had left.

So then, she told me, she had gone over to a railwayman and described her situation, whereupon he had run after the two Gestapo officers who were just leaving the platform and fetched them back.

‘Those two gentlemen from the Gestapo were ever so nice,’ she went on. They had been kind enough to take her back to the place where she had been living and unseal the door of her room, she said, and now she was waiting to be deported in line with regulations a week later.

I was on my way to see my friend Irene Scherhey and her mother, and I told them this story, which was weighing on my mind. ‘Drunks, small children and the simple-minded have a special guardian angel,’ was Selma Scherhey’s comment. It set off a strange idea in my mind, an idea that was to come in useful a little later: you only had to pretend to be simple-minded for a guardian angel to come to your aid.

Another incident also influenced me at this time. Frau Koch knew a clairvoyant through a laundry customer of hers. This woman practised her craft in Grünau once a week, although such things were strictly forbidden at the time. Hannchen Koch had a weak spot for mysticism and magic of that kind, and had insisted that we must both go.

I assume that this Frau Klemmstein, who allegedly didn’t know who I was, had some idea in advance of my particularly dangerous situation. In any case, she told me, ‘No one can pretend to a person like you. I don’t need cards or a crystal ball. We’ll just sit quietly together and close our eyes. Either I’ll make contact with you and have a vision, or I won’t. If I don’t I’ll tell you so honestly, and Frau Koch will get her money back. And if I do I’ll tell you what I saw.’

After we had been sitting in silence for a while, she said, ‘I see. I see two people, with a
Schein
.’
*
I thought: she’s crazy. I took her to mean a bright halo such as saints are shown wearing. However, I had opted for the wrong word; she meant a paper document, and more specifically an arrest warrant. ‘These men, or one of them, will tell you to go with him. If you do, you are going to certain death. But if you don’t – even if you get away by jumping off the top of a church tower – you will arrive at the bottom of it safe and sound, and you will live. When that moment comes you will hear my voice.’

A short time later a man with an arrest warrant did indeed turn up. As it happened, I was not on top of a church tower but in my room. It was 22 June 1942, and the doorbell rang at six in the morning. In the Germany of those days that was not the milkman arriving. There was no one who didn’t fear a man who came to the door at six a.m.

He was in civilian clothes. Frau Jacobsohn opened the door to him, and he said he must speak to me. I was still asleep, but woke in a terrible fright when I saw him standing beside my bed. In a calm and friendly tone he told me, ‘Get dressed and ready to go out. We want to ask you some questions. It won’t take long, and you’ll be back in a couple of hours.’ That was the kind of thing they always said to prevent people from falling into a fit of hysterics, or swallowing a poison capsule, or doing anything else that would have been inconvenient for the Gestapo.

At that moment I really did hear the clairvoyant’s voice in my room, loud and clear, and as if automatically I concentrated on the plan I had already hatched: I wouldn’t go with him, I would pretend to be half-witted.

Making out that I believed the man, I assumed a silly grin and asked, lapsing into a Berlin accent, ‘But questions like that, they could take hours, couldn’t they?’

‘Yes, they could take some time,’ he agreed.

‘But I got nothing to eat here – now my neighbour downstairs, she’ll always have coffee or suchlike on the stove, and I reckon she’d lend me a bit of bread. Can I get a bite to eat? I mean, like this in my petticoat – no one sees me this time of day, and I can’t run away from you dressed just in a petticoat, can I?’

So I went out. The only thing I unobtrusively snatched up was my handbag with my purse in it, and an empty glass bottle. I knew that they always came in pairs to take people away. And if the second man was waiting for me downstairs, either the bottle or his head would be broken. I wasn’t going to do as they told me without defending myself.

When I left the apartment I saw Frau Jacobsohn turn white as a sheet, but she invited the first man into her kitchen and said, ‘Come in and sit down; it’ll take some time for her downstairs to make a sandwich.’ She steered him over to a chair and moved the kitchen table in front of it, so that he was more or less penned in.

The second man was waiting down in the front hall of the building. I spontaneously switched the role I was playing. ‘Well, guess what?’ I said, giving him the glad eye. ‘I come out to polish my door knob before I go to work, and my little boy, he’s only two and a half, he slams the door on me! So now I got to get the spare key from the mother-in-law, and me in my petticoat, and here’s a fellow as I guess wants a bit of the other! At this time of day, too! I never heard the like of it! Men, I ask you!’ And so on.

He laughed uproariously, gave me a little slap on the behind, and thought that my conclusion about what he wanted was very funny.

‘Well, there’s no one going to see me like this,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in five minutes.’

It cost me a great effort to walk slowly to the next street corner. Then I ran. I spoke to the first person I met, an elderly labourer, briefly explaining my predicament. ‘Here, come into the entrance of this building,’ he said, ‘and I’ll lend you my windcheater. You’re small, I’m tall, I bet it’ll come down over your knees. Then we’ll both go to people you know who can lend you clothes.’ He seemed positively pleased. ‘And if I’m late to work, who cares? It’ll be worth it to put one over on those bastards for a change!’

My hair was loose, lying over my shoulders. He tied it up with a piece of string and escorted me to the Wolff family’s apartment. At the time Ernst was living in Neue Königstrasse with his parents, his aunt and his younger sister, the art historian Thea Wolff. His father was already over eighty, so Ernst was the real head of the family. His female relations were indignant about his beginning a relationship with a much younger girl when he was in charge of everything and made decisions for the family. They couldn’t stand me anyway.

But now they helped me at once. Thea Wolff gave me a summer dress in which I could venture out on the streets again. Apart from that I had almost nothing left: a few pfennigs in my purse, and my Jewish identity card. For now I kept the empty soda water bottle.

Later, by devious routes, I got back in touch with the Jacobsohns and found out that my landlady had kept the Gestapo man engaged in conversation for a whole hour, even getting around to the silly delaying tactic of showing him family photographs. And I truly revere the generosity of Frau Jacobsohn, a modest soul who had moved from the provinces to Berlin. She knew that she, her husband and their children would not be able to escape, but even taking that into account she was ready to accept that they would all be killed a few months earlier, so that she could give me a start on my pursuers.

I also discovered how it had turned out. After more than an hour, the second Gestapo man had come upstairs and asked his colleague, ‘Are you two nearly finished?’

When both men realised what had happened there was a frightful row. Each of them was blaming the other, until Frau Jacobsohn told them, ‘Gentlemen, I can tell you you’ve wasted an hour here for nothing. That young woman, my sub-tenant, isn’t the respectable sort. She often doesn’t come back all night. I’m afraid you’ve drawn a blank.’

But each of them was so mortally afraid of the other that they couldn’t agree on that version of events. Instead, they were stupid enough to tell the truth. Frau Jacobsohn was asked to go to see the Gestapo and found herself confronted with the two men, who were black and blue in the face.

‘Do you know these gentlemen?’ she was asked.

‘They look very different now,’ she replied.

One of the pair added, ‘If we’d known a young girl like that was such a tough nut to crack we’d have surrounded the whole block with police officers.’

On that occasion, Frau Jacobsohn was allowed to go home unharmed. Later, in March 1943, her whole family was deported and murdered.

It was still early in the day, and I didn’t know where to turn. The first person I went to see was my best friend Irene Scherhey. I used to share all my thoughts and feelings, plans and opinions with her. Irene was half-Jewish, and lived with her mother Selma in Prenzlauer Allee. Her Jewish father was dead; her mother was Aryan, and lived in constant fear for Irene.

They gave me a warm welcome, but I realised that I couldn’t stay long. It was possible that the Gestapo might come looking for me at my friends’ homes. Selma Scherhey gave me a handkerchief and a spare blouse to take with me, and then we all three said an emotional goodbye – ‘We’ll meet again after the liberation!’

By now I had at least decided where to go for the time being: into the lion’s den. I would seek refuge in a police station, and with none other than Emil Koch. He worked full-time for the police as a fireman,
*
and was based in an eastern suburb of the city.

I spent many hours there kicking my heels, as I sat at a long table. Firemen kept coming and going; for them a woman visiting the place was an unusual and welcome novelty. They all cracked jokes with me, and got a pert and amusing reply. I was in rather good humour. I’ve taken the first step, I thought, the really deciding one; the Gestapo won’t come looking for me here. In fact I felt easier in my mind than in the painfully difficult months I had just passed.

Somehow or other Emil managed to let Hannchen know where I was. He whispered to me that I was to go to them in Kaulsdorf late that evening.

I knew I could rely on the Kochs. While my father was alive, Frau Koch had kept saying, ‘This little house is still yours – our home is your home.’ But I also realised that I couldn’t stay in Kaulsdorf for long. There were neighbours who were fanatical Nazis and so malicious that everyone living nearby trembled at the thought of them. Whatever happened, those people must not get to know I was there. I would have to postpone my arrival until it was pitch dark outside, and as we had almost reached the longest day in the year that was quite late.

When I was finally about to go to bed that evening I asked Hannchen Koch, ‘Could you very kindly lend me a nightdress?’

‘Oh, so my fine young lady wears nightdresses?’ she asked sharply. I realised that I had made a mistake.