Underground in Berlin (20 page)

Her boss was much younger than Karola; he was married and, in line with the Führer’s wishes, he and his wife had several small children. But he made unwelcome advances to his secretary, and was always pestering her. She was repelled: ‘Lehmann is a bastard.’

She spoiled me for those two weeks by employing all her charm to seduce me. At the weekend she cooked us a festive meal, and decorated the table with coloured ribbons. We had roast mutton, and the best kale I had ever tasted. Once I mentioned in passing that I hadn’t eaten poultry for years. Oh, she said, how she wished she had thought of getting a boiling fowl to make soup for me.

Every evening she came to my bed, which was beautifully made up with white sheets, to give me a goodnight kiss. Once she heated the bathroom stove specially for us. When I was sitting in the water she came to wash me; she had found a cake of the finest, sweet-smelling pre-war soap specially for the occasion. This very cool, reserved woman with her delicate complexion and deep-set eyes suddenly said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you for decades. You’re my friend, my little sister, you’re what I’ve always longed for, you’re my daughter.’ Then she kissed me all over, praising the separate parts of my body and speaking as I had only ever heard men speak before. It was a remarkable outburst, but not unpleasant. I gave myself up to it, without showing any reaction, but thinking all the time: Oh God, this is a sin, this is a perversion.

She ended the scene after a few minutes by rubbing me dry. I went to bed, repeating the confession of sins as a way of somehow coping with the incident.

One day Karola told me that in the afternoon she was going to Zeuthen, a little place outside Berlin, to see her sister-in-law. When she came back late that evening, she put her arms round me and said, ‘I’ve done it. My hopes are fulfilled, Camilla will take you.’

My time with her was over. Karola had suffered from knowing that she was doing something forbidden, even though we had larked around together a great deal, often laughing until we cried. She didn’t invite me to come and stay with her again.

Before I could move to Camilla Fiochi’s, however, Heller had found somewhere else for me to go. Frau Janicke lived a little further to the south of Neukölln. The poorest streets of this part of the city were becoming familiar to me. There had never been many Jews living in these lower-class areas; they had not been considered good addresses. The advantage of that was that no one here knew me. I didn’t have to live with the constant fear of running into an informer.

I was to go and stay with Frau Janicke, allegedly as a nurse for her grandmother. This old lady, who came from a small town in Thuringia, had pneumonia. She wouldn’t have been comfortable in hospital, but could not stay at home alone; there was a shortage of doctors, for most of them were at the front. No doctor paid home visits these days to ordinary patients on a health plan – except for Benno Heller. Of course it was against the law for him to look after this old Aryan woman, but he was happy to do it in order to help me find a new refuge.

Gerda Janicke had a small son about two and a half years old. Her husband was at the front. She lived in her apartment – one and a half rooms at 18 Schierker Strasse – with her grandmother, her adored little boy, and now me. I found myself in an environment that was the quintessence of the lower middle class. Many Nazis who prided themselves on supporting the cause lived in this apartment block, which was still a new building at the time. On festive days the place was thick with swastika banners.

I hated having to play the part of a nurse. Frau Janicke gave me a white overall and I tied a white scarf round my head, but I had no idea what I ought to be doing. The old lady was always calling out, ‘Nurse!’ in her Thuringian dialect, and I scurried around the apartment looking busy. Heller had persuaded Frau Janicke that nursing her grandmother would be a great strain on her, and it would be useful to everyone if she took me in to help with the work of the household. But there wasn’t really much to be done.

There had been no agreement on my board, so I was terribly hungry. Once a week I met Frau Koch in a cheap café in Köpenick, and ate the standard dish of the day there. She also gave me a little pocket money, a bread roll and perhaps a hundred grams of margarine. But that was nowhere near enough to satisfy me. Meanwhile I watched chubby-cheeked little Jörg, Frau Janicke’s son, thriving and eating any amount of food. In my mind I called this voracious child the ‘Little Teuton’.

And her grandmother, that silly old woman who thought the world of the Führer, distrusted me from the first. Once, when Frau Janicke was taking the child for a walk, she called, ‘Nurse, I’d like some bread and butter.’ There was a beautiful loaf of rye bread in the kitchen. Its aroma rose to my nostrils so strongly that I was afraid I might go mad with hunger. I had to spread slice after slice of bread for the old woman, at least four of them. Then she told her granddaughter that she had eaten only two slices, so I was under suspicion of stealing food. Frau Janicke cut notches in her loaf from underneath so that she would notice at once if I secretly took a slice.

All the same, I found ways and means. When the mistress of the house was out, I would turn the butter dish upside down on a hot, damp cloth to make its contents fall on the cloth. That was because the pat of butter was stamped on top with a pattern that I could not have reproduced, but I could shave a very thin slice off the bottom of the pat and eat it. Frau Janicke wondered why the butter was disappearing so quickly, but did not see through my trick.

To soothe my guilty conscience, I mentally drafted a set of rules for my situation in legal jargon. I called it the ‘Reich Law on the Theft of Victuals as Applied to Those Who Have Gone Underground’. I couldn’t write it down complete with all its clauses, since I had no paper, but mocking the authorities in that way made me feel a little better.

Once a week at midday I went to see the Hellers, who lived next to Benno Heller’s practice. Sometimes I just looked in for a moment to say that everything was all right, and I had no news. On one such visit I saw the couple’s dining room, which was furnished in very good taste with a large mahogany dining table and other items in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] of the Weimar Republic period. There were no fancifully ornamented old sideboards or dressers here.

The chairs were covered with royal blue velvet. When Heller asked me to sit down, his wife instantly interrupted him. ‘Wait a minute! Newspaper first!’ He then put a sheet of newspaper on the seat of the chair to protect it – as if I had been wallowing in the dirt. That was just one of the dreadful humiliations that I suffered at the couple’s hands. Later, I found out that everyone who entered that dining room was made to sit on a newspaper in the same way.

This room was the apple of Frau Heller’s eye. She looked after it with the most meticulous care. Once, when she had visitors, she thought the cleaning lady hadn’t polished the wooden parquet flooring well enough. She picked up the heavy broom used for that purpose and worked away on the floor until, since she had chronic heart trouble, she suffered a bad attack.

That was what the Hellers were like: on the one hand heroically ready to risk their lives for others, on the other thinking as much of their polished floor as of resistance to the Nazis.

I was under observation in Frau Janicke’s apartment. A doorman’s wife by the name of Krause lived one floor down, a woman who thought herself every inch the member of a superior class. Her son was an engineer, and she was a great supporter of the Nazi regime. She was always asking Frau Janicke, ‘Why don’t you get that woman who’s living with you and looking after your grandmother properly registered?’ Frau Janicke had to think up excuses. She claimed that I only occasionally slept in the apartment, but all the same she often sent me out to fetch milk early in the morning, when anyone could see me.

‘Frau Janicke, do I have to?’ I asked.

‘Please, couldn’t you make yourself a bit useful? I’m doing enough for you. And anyway I’m still in my dressing-gown.’

So I would slip out early in the morning to the dairy, which was a great place for gossip. I got milk on the ration card for small children, and the first thing I did was to disappear into the front entrance of a building and drink a good gulp of it. But now I had to fill the milk can up again. As it happened, there was a pump very close, but I didn’t know how to pump just the right amount of water into the can, working it on my own.

Then an SA man came along. ‘Can I help you?’ he asked in friendly tones. ‘I see you have your hands full.’ And he pumped water for me. I let some of it run into the hollow of my hand, which meant I could fill the can up to the right level again. I thanked him heartily, and the SA man said goodbye as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to help me dilute the milk. Frau Janicke was alone in noticing that the milk in the can had a blue tinge to it. ‘How can I help that?’ I asked. ‘How am I to know what quality of milk gets delivered to the dairy?’ When she next went to get milk herself, it wasn’t as blue as before.

There was also increasing tension between me and Dr Heller. He learned that Frau Janicke was dissatisfied with my nursing skills.

Once I told him, ‘That sick old lady is so thin, I get the impression she has a tapeworm. I’ve seen something like that when I sat her on the toilet.’

‘That would explain a lot,’ he said. ‘Another day you must keep whatever comes away there.’ Next time he paid a home visit he looked at the results, and said, ‘You silly girl, that’s not a tapeworm, you’ve seen but scraps of the intestines that can come away at any time. Really, you have no idea what you’re doing!’

‘How am I supposed to know that?’

The gynaecologist Benno Heller and his wife Irmgard, around 1930
. (photo credit 4.1)

‘A student nurse is expected to have mastered the basic elements of nursing the sick after two months.’

‘But I’m not a student nurse!’

‘No, you’re the distinguished holder of a school-leaving certificate, you know Latin and French and you’re highly educated, but when it comes to anything practical you’re hopeless.’

Quarrels like that were quite common between us, and they did much to damage my self-confidence. We fought like cat and dog, and then made up the quarrel and felt close to each other again.

His wife, however, clearly couldn’t stand me.

Irmgard Heller was a tall, very slender lady, and she always wore her hair in the traditional German style. In the war, that was known as the ‘all-clear hairdo’, referring to the All Clear when an air raid was over, and everyone could come out of the shelters. When she put her head back a little way, I felt I ought to address her in medieval language as ‘Most noble lady’.

She came from the upper middle-class society of Leipzig, and should really have married someone from the same circles. But then the First World War broke out, she had gone to work at a field hospital, and there had fallen in love with Benno Heller, a medical student assisting the doctors. She married that son of a Jewish merchant family in Bad Dürkheim, and adored him for ever after.

Heller’s wife had good reasons not to like me. It was my fault that a tender relationship of the past between her husband and Frau Janicke had been revived. He sometimes visited Frau Janicke’s apartment with his Jewish star concealed, and not only to treat her sick grandmother. Heller himself once asked me angrily, ‘Do you suppose I’m doing it for fun? When I have so much on my mind, and we’re all of us malnourished? I have to pay Frau Janicke for sheltering you with my prowess in bed.’ That was dreadfully embarrassing to me, but what could I do about it?

Frau Janicke herself, on the other hand, tried to keep the relationship secret from me. She claimed to have a new lover who was a dentist. When he was with her, I had to stay away from the apartment. Afterwards, she would put the doormat outside the door lengthwise as a signal to me that it was all clear.