Underground in Berlin (18 page)

A few minutes later he came back, beaming. ‘Yes, all in order: identity card number, address, maiden name and date of birth.’ I felt enormously relieved. No one had noticed the forged date of birth, 1915. That obvious discrepancy could have been the death of me.

‘Can I go now?’ I asked, casually. ‘I have to do a few things in Vienna before I go on to Berlin.’

‘Not yet, I have to ask you to wait. We still have to speak to police HQ in Berlin.’

‘I see. Will it take long?’

‘Well, right now I don’t have the time to make the phone call, so it could be quite a while.’

I asked him where the toilet was. My body was reacting violently to all this upheaval, and I suddenly felt unable to stay in the building a moment longer. In the toilet I took my hundred-mark note out of my shoe. Then I looked out of the window. Two German soldiers were on guard only a few metres away. Within seconds I had an idea.

‘Hey, you fine gents, run after them! Those bloody Balkan guys stole my case! Look, there they go!’ I shouted at the soldiers.

‘Can’t be done, we’re on guard, we have to stay put.’

‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’

‘On guard means on guard!’

‘Then help me out of this window! I’ll have to go after them myself,’ I snapped furiously. The two young soldiers helped me out of the window like the good boys they were, and I chased after the supposed thieves.

After that everything happened very fast. At the next street corner I asked someone the way to the railway station. Soon after that a tram came along, I got on it, and was at the station within a few minutes. I quickly went over to the Left Luggage counter, where I got my case back without any difficulty. Then to the ticket office, where I bought my ticket. No problem with passport checks either; Vienna was in the Ostmark area. I asked when the next train for Berlin left.

‘Don’t worry,’ I was told. ‘Up those steps, you can take your time. You have five minutes.’ It was pure chance that a connection to Berlin ran from Franz Joseph Station in Vienna, and at that very moment too.

I found myself in a compartment with a nice bunch of young Austrian soldiers as my travelling companions. When I asked them to lift my case up to the luggage net, they laughed themselves silly at my Berlin accent. Then they brought out a wonderful rustic loaf, sliced it, spread the slices with butter, topped them with cheese and sausage and invited me to share their meal. I certainly didn’t go hungry on that journey.

And so, on the morning of 6 November 1942, I was back in the city of Berlin that I had left seven weeks earlier.

Early in the evening we all met at the Koebners’ apartment in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse. Once again I noticed the vanity of Benno Heller, the gynaecologist, not to mention the great care that he devoted to his wardrobe. When he took off his scarf and gloves, he put them down so that everyone could see they came from an expensive sports shop on the Kurfürstendamm.

We sat down at the large, handsome dining table, and Frau Koebner made herbal tea. I had asked for this meeting soon after my return in November 1942, and it was at my suggestion that Heller was also there. For he, too, had turned to Koebner’s forgery workshop; he wanted to get out of Germany, and that could be done only with forged papers. I wanted to warn the men against making any more use of the blank forms from the Warsaw air district command post. Judging by my recent experience, it seemed that they would do no one any good now.

Hannchen Koch spoke first; I had spent the first night after my return with her. While her husband was on shift duty at the police station, I had slept soundly in the Kochs’ marital bed for almost twenty-four hours. Hannchen had decided to keep Emil out of my affairs in future. ‘I will see to it that you’re safe on my own. I’ll make all the necessary sacrifices,’ she had told me, as usual rather too emotionally.

Now, shyly and quietly, Frau Koch made some remarks mingling, in wild confusion, all she knew about magic, mysticism, the occult and the interpretation of dreams. She told us that she was trying to influence the political situation by damaging Hitler’s astral body. I felt that this was incredibly embarrassing, but everyone kept a straight face. After a few minutes I reached over the table to take her arm and said, I’m afraid in far too loud a voice, ‘Hannchen, that’s wonderful.’

At the same moment the shrill sound of the doorbell was heard. We were all terribly alarmed. Who could be at the door?

Then we all set to work very fast. While Frau Koebner went to answer the door, her husband and son cleared the living room. The table and chairs were pushed aside, the rug rolled up. Someone wound the gramophone, put on a record, and immediately music began to play. We were staging a dancing party. With an elegant bow, Heller invited Frau Koch to dance, while the gramophone belted out an old hit song with a catchy rhythm.
I’d like to be the lodger in Miss Liesbeth’s downstairs room, For I’m a merry dodger, we’d have such fun – zing boom!

The music carried me away: Fritz Koebner, one of the sons of the family, had led me out on the improvised dance floor. His elder brother Heinz and Heinz’s fiancée were not there. I saw Frau Koch closing her eyes. In spite of all the anxiety and alarms, she looked ecstatic dancing with her dream-doctor, who looked exactly the part of a film star playing a gynaecologist in a sentimental romance. Her face expressed wistful delight – she might have been on the point of coming to orgasm. While Heller skilfully guided her round the floor in his well-disciplined style, Hannchen Koch arched her back and moved her behind half a metre to left or right with every step of the dance.

Fritz Koebner led me into a corner of the room, tapped me lightly on the shoulder and breathed into my ear, almost inaudibly, ‘I’d better warn you.’ I looked inquiringly at him, but he fell silent, for just then Frau Koch, waggling her behind, sashayed past us. ‘Warn you against my father,’ he whispered. My conscious mind refused to take in this information; it was too full, so to speak, to admit anything else.

All this happened within a few bars of the music. Then the door was flung open, and we heard Frau Koebner’s voice. ‘All clear! It was only Frau Hansl from downstairs kindly bringing us a bag of sugar.’ The gramophone was switched off at once, and normal conditions were restored. I was slightly sorry when the music stopped. I’d have liked to go on watching Frau Koch doing her grotesque dance.

But now it was time for me to tell the story of my journey, and then we would decide what to do next.

When I had finished, someone asked me where I would really like to go. ‘France. I’d love to see France,’ I heard myself saying, to my own surprise. But reality, as I knew, was very different: I needed a place to hide in Berlin, and I depended entirely on the people here at the Koebners’ to help me. I didn’t want to get in touch with my Jewish friends and acquaintances, not with Irene Scherhey, or Ernst Schindler or Max Bäcker. They mustn’t even know that I was back in Berlin.

Frau Koebner had been very friendly to me from the first. I had liked her at once: she was a pleasant, clever woman. Her husband, on the other hand, behaved with courteous civility to me but showed no personal warmth. I thought I even detected a certain dislike in his attitude. Now, rather reluctantly, he said he would have to think up a new strategy. Heller suddenly seemed to be upset; he had spent a good deal of money on his blank forms from Warsaw, and now he didn’t know whether they would be any more use to him.

Finally, Fritz had an idea. Before 1933 the Koebners had often spent the summer holidays as sub-tenants of an old man who lived beside the Wannsee. Until his retirement he had commanded huge ocean-going steamships, and then had captained a barge on the River Spree. This captain, Fritz thought, was a sad and lonely bachelor, and would surely be glad of a little female company in his basement apartment. In addition, said Fritz, he had never concealed his poor opinion of the Nazis. After they came to power, he had written letters to all the Jews he knew personally, telling them how indignant he felt about the treatment they were suffering.

Fritz Koebner said he would go to see this Herr Klaar in Kladow the next day. Our little party broke up. I went a few steps further with Hannchen Koch to Alexanderplatz. This was the part of the city where I had grown up, and where I had always had many friends and relations. But now I didn’t know where to spend the night. Emil Koch’s night shifts had come to an end, so I couldn’t go back to Kaulsdorf. In any case, it was close to miraculous that the Gestapo hadn’t long ago turned up at Hannchen Koch’s home. After all, I had travelled under her name to Bulgaria, where I had attracted the attention of the police several times.

When we said goodbye, Hannchen pressed a milk can into my hand. She thought that would protect me from suspicion; if I happened to come up against a checkpoint I should just say I was off to get milk for my child. Only when we had parted did it occur to me how pointless this idea was. No one went to get milk for her child in the middle of the night. And as I clutched the metal handle of the can my fingers were slowly turning numb. It was a cold November evening.

I got on the Ringbahn, the circular line of the S-Bahn railway, and rode round it a couple of times. After a while I had had enough of it. I knew that all I could do was stay awake until next morning by walking through the city.

I also had a very pressing problem. I needed the toilet, for the full works.

I was in an area that I didn’t know, somewhere in the south-west of the city. The front doors of all buildings had to be left unlocked at night because of the air raids, so that the emergency services could storm in to the rescue if there was a fire. I went into one of these unpretentious apartment buildings and crept quietly up the stairs. When I saw a name that I didn’t like on a door, because it had a Nazi ring to it, I squatted down and did my business. I left some newspaper there too. What would the people in that apartment think next morning when they found what I had left on their doormat?

Then, next day, I did think of someone I could visit in Berlin. On board the Danube ship I had met a Bulgarian called Todor Nedeltchev, a fair-haired giant about my own age with a primitive, rather childlike face. He had often hung around me on the ship, telling me over and over again, ‘I German speak very good, very nice.’ Those assurances, however, exhausted his entire German vocabulary.

I knew that Todor was going to Berlin himself. He had given me the address of his lodgings, in Teltow next to the factory where he worked. I set off for it.

Sure enough, I found Todor at once. He was glad to see me again, and showed me the hut where he and the other foreign labourers lived. I was worn out and very short of sleep. I could think of nothing but where to stay for the next few days. Todor was my last hope, so I came straight to the point.

‘Where can we find somewhere private here?’ I asked in my broken Bulgarian. I was going to offer him a tender interlude and then suggest that we get engaged. If we did he would be able to find a place for us both – not as a long-term solution, of course, since I had no papers that I could show the police. But perhaps I could get through one or two weeks in that way.

Rather clumsily, Todor led me to the communal shower, which was entirely empty at that hour in the morning. I drew him into it, bolted the door on the inside and said, ‘I know what you men like! Let’s not bother about long preliminaries – we’ll do it now and then we can get engaged.’ A fuse had somehow blown inside me.

The man looked rather foolish. It reminded me a little of the idiotic expression that Charlie Chaplin sometimes wore – a mixture of bafflement and awkwardness. He stood there perfectly still when I tried to take him in my arms. Then, hesitantly, he admitted that he had never had anything to do with a girl before. He felt very embarrassed about it.

I tried to make it clear that I was offering him an engagement. When he had grasped that, and overcome his shock, he was enthusiastic. We set off at once in search of accommodation.

We spent all day together, without much more to say to one another than ‘very good’ and ‘very nice’, and we asked various acquaintances of his, but no one had a room for us. So we parted that evening with many good wishes, and that was the end of my relationship with Todor Nedeltchev.

Fritz Koebner had been more successful. He had found Captain Klaar at home, and the captain had immediately agreed to take me in.

Fritz took me to see him next day. We travelled separately to the Wannsee S-Bahn station. Fritz was dark-haired, looked distinctly Jewish, and of course had to wear the yellow star. But he had a second jacket with him in a travelling bag, and he put it on in the toilet of the S-Bahn station at Wannsee. Then we walked the rest of the way to Kladow together, while he told me about his father.