Underground in Berlin (24 page)

‘Stay alive,’ I replied, with the casual phrase that so many people used when saying goodbye in wartime.

Basically, the Janickes’ apartment in Schierker Strasse consisted of a single room, which was also difficult to heat. Like all other such rooms in this apartment block, it was used as a bedroom; bedroom furniture with a handsome bed frame was the pride and joy of the lower middle classes of our society. A cupboard for crockery, books and bed linen all combined stood in another, half-sized room. This ice-cold little room also contained a sofa, and that was where I slept.

Instead of the grandmother in need of nursing, who had gone home to Thuringia, there was now another young woman who had gone underground in this tiny apartment. Eva Deutschkron was a few years older than me, and had also been sent to Gerda Janicke by Benno Heller. The two women were in total agreement about everything, including young Jörg, whom I now saw again.

Eva Deutschkron was a trained dressmaker, and sat at the sewing machine all day. She made rompers for the little boy, altered his clothes, and also worked on renovating Frau Janicke’s wardrobe. Eva saw no reason why this needlework should ever come to an end. Her hostess enjoyed having her own personal dressmaker, as Heller put it, to the amusement of both women. ‘You know, your sewing is like the
Tales of the Thousand and One Nights
,’ I once told Eva.

Our real life was spent in the kitchen. Even this room was never really warm, despite the presence of a coal stove. The two ladies ate their meals there with cute little Jörg, while I watched – or rather, turned away. My mouth was watering, but they didn’t give me anything to eat.

Otherwise, Gerda Janicke sat about on the coal-box unoccupied for most of the time. She was a pretty, rather plump woman, but she let both the corners of her mouth and her shoulders droop. ‘Even her clothes are weeping,’ my grandmother would have said.

My hostess had grown up in very poor circumstances. She had been treated as a child all her life, bossed around first by her horrible parents, whom I had met, then by her husband. She had never been the kind of woman who could give other people instructions. That had changed when I came to stay with her. There was no doubt that she was risking her life for me, but she also enjoyed being in charge for once. ‘You must be available to do housework at any time,’ she told me, for instance, although there wasn’t really much housework to be done. ‘I can’t have you going off to Köpenick all the time to see that friend of yours.’ That meant I didn’t even get the meagre diet that Hannchen Koch saved for me out of her own rations. For days on end I had absolutely nothing to eat, and I was hungrier than I had ever been before.

In these days I began hating Eva Deutschkron like poison. At the same time I was ashamed of myself for it, considering my feelings inappropriate, unseemly and ungrateful. She did me no harm. But I could hardly think clearly because I was crazed by hunger.

I kept repeating the words of the confession of sins, and in a kind of childish superstition I wanted to prove myself guilty of as many sins as possible. I hoped that my suffering, my fear and my need were a punishment for my misdeeds – because then there was a prospect of their coming to an end when I had atoned for everything.

Unlike me, Eva Deutschkron had ration cards of her own. She told me how she had come by them when we were washing the dishes, and had been passing the time by finding out whether we had any acquaintances in common. In that way we came to Mirjam Grunwald, who had been in the same class as me at school.

She was an intelligent, talented, highly educated girl, and came from a distinguished and cultured Jewish family. Like me again, Mirjam was one of the best students in the class. We had been very polite, but had not really taken to each other.

Mirjam’s parents had been given an opportunity to go abroad, but when it came to Mirjam herself the trap closed on her. She was called up to do forced labour. Of course it was terrible for her parents to leave Germany without their daughter. To find some way out of this conflict, they left all their fortune behind for her as a ‘black-market’ fund. I imagined this, picturesquely, as a large sack of money consisting of coins painted black. The money was to make it easier for Mirjam to survive, and they hoped she would be able to follow them to the United States as soon as possible.

The two girls got to know each other in the firm where Eva Deutschkron and her husband were also doing forced labour. Eva talked about her early marriage there, and passed round a photo of her husband. One weekend, to their surprise, the young couple were invited to coffee by Mirjam Grunwald, who entertained them very hospitably.

Then Mirjam told the couple that she had means of going underground; she had money, an address to which she could disappear, and a source of ration cards. But she could bear her mortal terror only in the arms of a man. So she suggested a very unusual bargain: Eva was to lend Mirjam her husband for an indefinite period of time, getting money and ration cards in return. Part of the deal was that Eva would see her husband just once a month: no love-making, no emotional outbursts, their meeting would be only so that they could know they were both still alive.

This proposition left Eva utterly baffled. She went to the Hellers to ask what they thought. Their advice was: ‘In absurd times, everything is absurd. You can save yourselves only by absurd means, since the Nazis are out to murder you all.’ So in the end the young couple agreed to the bargain. Eva Deutschkron told me all this amidst fits of terrible weeping. Frau Janicke knew about it, but Eva asked me not to let her know that now I knew as well.

Myself, I had reached the lowest point of my life. I was freezing all day, my teeth chattered with cold and hunger. And suddenly I had another very unpleasant affliction; I felt stabbing pains in my bladder and couldn’t contain my urine. When it happened I was in the dairy, fetching milk for Frau Janicke. A pool formed beneath me. I don’t know whether the other people there noticed anything, but I couldn’t help it. I thought, desperately:
the enemy is doing all this to us
. Perhaps such repellent things are actually easier for others to understand than piles of corpses, than the really great crimes of human history.

It was particularly uncomfortable that I had no way of washing and drying my clothes. My underclothes stuck to my body, dried slowly – and stank. Now Eva Deutschkron and Gerda Janicke really could consider themselves a class above me.

I wasn’t allowed to go to the toilet at night. Early in the morning I had to fetch milk. So I simply took the milk can to my ice-cold bed with me and used it as often as necessary. In the morning I emptied the can in the bathroom and rinsed it out – sneakily, I have to admit – with cold water. This disgusting business too, I told myself, can be chalked up to the enemy’s account.

One afternoon the two other women set out for a long walk with Jörg, the Little Teuton, leaving me with the task of polishing the kitchen furniture to a shine with a piece of leather. I soon realised that no shine could be achieved by that method, and I didn’t have the strength for it either. So I simply lay down on the sofa and read. At some point, Herr Janicke had acquired a wonderful leather-bound edition of the works of Dostoevsky. This diversion saved me for a little while. I was reading
The Brothers Karamazov
for the first time, and was fascinated even as my teeth chattered.

Suddenly I was aware that the three would soon be back. I quickly climbed on a chair and wiped the furniture at the very top, expecting Frau Janicke to check up on it there. Then I lay down on the sofa again, but was ready to jump up as soon as I heard footsteps on the stairs.

I didn’t notice that the dust on top of the cupboard was now running black and slimy down the sides like ink.

Of course this incident was reported to the Hellers, hot off the press. Both Eva and Gerda were enthusiastic about Benno Heller, with his resemblance to a dream doctor in a Hollywood film. They, like me, regularly visited him to tell him how things were going. They particularly liked to describe my disastrous influence on the housekeeping.

‘Ah, so here’s our distinguished holder of the school-leaving certificate,’ said Heller the next time I went to see him. ‘Fabulous. You should be proud of that certificate, Marie, since you can’t do anything of the least practical use.’ He sat down at the piano and played a few bars. The doors to his consulting rooms were open, and all his patients could and were intended to hear him. Then, with his wife joining in, he adapted the refrain of a walking song from
fal-lal-lee, fal-lal-la
’ to ‘
Grubby girl, dirty girl
’, which they sang in two parts.

‘I can explain what happened,’ I said desperately. ‘I’m not well, I have an inflammation of the bladder. Please give me something to cure it.’

‘Out of the question,’ he replied angrily.

‘But there must be something to make it better, isn’t there?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he replied again, and he added a strange remark. ‘Jews who go underground don’t get sick.’

I couldn’t sleep the following night. My thoughts were in confusion. I was afraid of simply falling down in the street unconscious in my hungry, wretched condition. And then, if I was taken to the police, my whole struggle so far would have been for nothing.

As I lay in bed, shivering all over, I suddenly heard the nursery rhyme about ‘Hänschen klein’ [Little Hans]. It wasn’t me singing it but a boy, the son of a cleaner who had been very helpful to us in the year of my mother’s death. Even as a child, Fred Heinzel had been against the Nazis.

I thought: why am I suddenly hearing this song? There must be some connection between Heller’s refusal to help me and little Fred Heinzel. And then, in my strange mental state between dream and reality, I made up my mind about something: if I could solve that puzzle I would take it as a good omen. But if I couldn’t solve it I would not take it as a bad omen, because that would be superstition, which is not allowed in Jewish tradition.

Meanwhile, I kept hearing Fred Heinzel’s voice singing ‘Hänschen klein’. And suddenly I had a picture in front of my eyes. We were sitting by the open hearth in the dining room of the Prenzlauer Strasse apartment of my childhood. The boy was telling my father about school, where he had trouble with the very demanding gymnastic exercises in the military style that he was expected to do. They had made him cry in the sports lesson. He had told his gymnastics teacher, a staunch Nazi and a sadist, that he couldn’t do the exercises any more because he was in pain. Thereupon the martinet had shouted at him, ‘German boys don’t get sick!’ That was the connection. Heller had said, ‘Jews who go underground don’t get sick.’ Although he was a good doctor, intelligent when it came to making a diagnosis and psychologically skilled in treating his patients, he couldn’t bear the visitors in his two waiting rooms to mingle with each other. To him, I might be a Jew who had gone underground, but I mustn’t be a sick Jew.

I woke up next morning feeling relieved. I had solved the puzzle and I would get better. And sure enough, after exactly a week I had thrown off the infection. By this time Eva Deutschkron had run out of new fashion ideas to keep Frau Janicke happy. She had once dreamed of being a fashion designer, and she had already designed a beach outfit, a walking costume and evening dresses for her friend. It was February, so I suggested, ‘Why not design a Carnival costume?’

‘Oh, what a good idea. I can spend a whole afternoon with that,’ replied Eva. She was genuinely grateful to me.

When she showed us her costume designs, we went on to talk about New Year’s Eve, and Gerda Janicke mentioned the custom of telling fortunes from the shapes taken by molten lead dropped into water. That reminded me of my encounter with the clairvoyant, and the idea came up of asking for her services again. ‘I’d really like to know whether my apartment is going to be bombed,’ said Frau Janicke.

I knew where Frau Klemmstein lived, but to get permission for an extra outing I claimed that I would have to ask Frau Koch. Trying to telephone her could take a long time, because she was often out and about in the extensive laundry building where she worked. ‘Stay out as long as you need,’ said Frau Janicke generously.

I used this opportunity to celebrate my recovery. I ordered and ate the cheap standard dish of the day in two different cafés, a cabbage one-pot dish and a swede one-pot dish – that was luxury, even thought there wasn’t a gram of meat or fat in either, but at least they were hot. Then I went to a shabby coffee-house for a cup of ersatz coffee. I could be as extravagant as this only because I had prospects of money – I had decided that my visit to Frau Klemmstein would be purely fictional. I was going to keep the money for her clairvoyance and for the telephone and travelling, and I would spend it on myself.

I went happily back to Schierker Strasse, told them that Frau Koch had given me the name of the village where the clairvoyant lived, and that when I got there I would have to ask the way, because fortune-telling was illegal. It cost five marks per fortune. Then Frau Janicke cast the lead herself, and a woman she knew joined her. On the day when I had arranged to visit Trude Neuke for the first time since leaving Zeuthen, I told them that I was going to see the clairvoyant.