Underground in Berlin (38 page)

Every night we found ourselves, sooner or later, in a large cellar that served as an air-raid shelter for several buildings. An especially strict air-raid warden often came round to check our papers. He was mainly interested in the men, since there was a truly hysterical search on for deserters. I inconspicuously slipped past him and managed to avoid showing my identity card.

After a few days our new lodging was also hit by a high-explosive bomb. Everything above us collapsed with an enormous noise. The cellar shook, but its ceiling stood up to the blast. Many of us were screaming. I ducked in fear and horror, and covered my eyes and ears.

Then calm returned again, and a kind of snowstorm began: the mighty shock of the explosion had loosened the whitewash from the walls. My eyes were inflamed for quite a long time from being in that vast cloud of dust.

‘Bombed out!’ several people who had lived in these buildings cried in horror. So far as they were concerned, their whole world had collapsed. I had only lost the part of the city where I had been living. ‘We’re buried alive!’ was the next cry to go up. The entrance through which we had got into the cellar was blocked by rubble. Men in uniform picked up the tools ready for use if that happened, and began hacking another way out. Burgers helped them.

I sat calmly on my improvised bench and waited. Several old women were in tears. After about an hour there were shouts of, ‘The way out is clear!’ We left the cellar to find ourselves facing great mounds of rubble from which nothing could be salvaged, not a piece of furniture and no personal possessions.

Burgers looked at the time. It was early morning, when he usually went to work. As ever, he was aware of his duty. We stood in the road, discussing our situation. Even now we were talking nonsense.

‘Right, listen,’ said Burgers. ‘This is what we’ll do.’ And that was the end of it; he had no idea what to say next. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I have another suggestion.’ But in fact I had no suggestion at all, and we went on talking like that for some time. We were baffled, and had no idea what to do next.

He looked at the time again, and seemed nervous and fidgety. ‘I’ll have to go now,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether there’s any transport to use or if I’ll have to go on foot. I must tell them at work that I’ve been bombed out, and then they’ll find me a place in shared accommodation for foreign workers. We won’t get another furnished room.’

And so we went our separate ways. ‘Goodbye, the war will soon be over!’ we told each other, adding, ‘See you again after liberation.’ It couldn’t have been a less dramatic parting. If one of us had gone off to buy a loaf of bread, expecting to be back a few minutes later, it would have been just the same.

I was amazed. I had expected the last, chaotic days of the war to be full of loud noise, but instead a curious, positively eerie silence reigned in Berlin.

I was also amazed to find how easy it was to get to Kaulsdorf.
*
Contrary to all expectation and my experience to date, there was a regular, fast suburban train line running to Wuhlheide.

After I had said goodbye to Burgers and walked through Berlin for a few hours, I had set off in search of the Kochs. I felt it would be apposite to see in the first days of liberation where I had spent my first night after going into hiding. This was the end of March 1945, and I wasn’t to know that it would still be several weeks before the war finally came to an end.

As I walked along the footpath through the wood, I composed a few sentences in my head for Hannchen and Emil: I wanted to thank them for everything. I was going to say that it was they who had really helped and saved me, it was they, more than anyone, who had given me the courage to go underground, because they had shown me that there were people who would come to my aid. But I kept thinking that the tribute I was composing in my head was too long and too stilted, and I tried to devise ways of expressing myself more briefly and precisely, less pompously.

As I approached the little house that had once been my family’s holiday home, several different voices spoke up inside me. I hope nothing’s gone wrong, I hope the house hasn’t been bombed or damaged and the Kochs are all right, said one voice. You’re lying, another voice contradicted the first, you really hope the place is in ruins with the Kochs buried under them, and then you’d stand there crying your eyes out, but so far as you’re concerned that would be the end of it, and you wouldn’t have to be grateful to anyone. But that’s horrible of you, said the first voice, you have to hope the Kochs are all right, even if your relationship with them is difficult. And so it went on back and forth for quite some time. At a loss, I sat down on a tree stump.

Frau Koch looked terrible. She was worn out, utterly exhausted. She had her daily work in the laundry, she also had to look after her house and garden, her husband and her old parents. She was spending her nights in what was called a slit trench, not an air-raid shelter but an open trench in a zigzag shape dug out on a large meadow near the Kochs’ house. It was open to the sky, and you sat in it on improvised wooden benches.

But I sensed that Hannchen Koch was not just exhausted, she was also angry and hostile. She was not a bit pleased to see me. ‘My parents have been bombed out,’ she told me, ‘and now they’re living here too.’ In fact only her father was in the house. As it turned out later, he couldn’t be said to have been bombed out. He simply hadn’t known how to look after himself, and had made up the story about the bomb damage because his wife was mentally sick and in a state of total confusion. She had been going out on the streets stark naked in all seasons, and often couldn’t find her way home again. Hannchen’s father therefore broke a window pane that had been cracked for years, smashed some empty glasses and tipped the china cupboard over: that was the full extent of the ‘bomb damage’. He hadn’t broken the empty bottles on which he could get a deposit back, but stacked them carefully in a corner. It was an unintentionally comic spectacle staged by a desperate man.

As the old man was convinced of the merits of natural healing, after moving into Hannchen’s house he had turned for advice to Professor Paul Vogler, director of the Naturopathic Hospital. He had come back from seeing him very disappointed: there was no herbal remedy to cure his wife’s condition. Committing her to the Wittenauer Heilanstalten
*
could no longer be avoided. The certificate to that effect was still lying on the table, and I read it too. It said, straight out, ‘Frau Guthmann is completely demented.’ Since then Adolf Guthmann had been regularly visiting his wife in the asylum, although the way to Reinickendorf was long and difficult.

Herr Guthmann was as unenthusiastic about my arrival as I was to see him there. He was a staunch Nazi, although he had always been too miserly to join the National Socialist Party, and he was also a very unlikeable character who was constantly afraid of not getting his due. From the first moment, when we shook hands with friendly smiles, there was a deep mutual antipathy between us.

He also thought it was only natural for his daughter to look after him, and often pointed out that he was, after all, living in his own daughter’s house. Nazi bastard, I thought, this is really my house, and you’ve only Aryanised it.
^†
I must confess that I was wrong there, and full of hate as I was I did him an injustice. I had to try very hard to stay humane, because survival means not sinking to the level of your enemies.

Of course the old man was an anti-Semite. That was part of his ideology. He told a story of how, as a child, he and some other boys had cut sticks to size, smeared them with birdlime to catch flies, and gone around the local farms praising the virtues of their fly-catching sticks, but he was the only one to express himself grammatically. A rich gentleman who looked like an entrepreneur or a businessman happened to pass by, praised his correct manner of speech and bought all his fly-catching sticks. ‘He was a Jew,’ growled Hannchen’s father. He made a face, showed the same revulsion as old Frau Blase in her reaction to that word.

‘So he wasn’t nice to you?’ I asked, pretending to innocence. The old man was surprised. ‘What a question! And you an intelligent person at that! No, he wasn’t just nice, he was charming. It was really moving.’ There was no way to argue with the man.

A few days after my arrival in Kaulsdorf a telegram came from the hospital: sad to say, the patient Elisabeth Guthmann had died of heart failure. It was obvious to me that they didn’t want to go on feeding someone incurably ill. I knew already that murder was committed in psychiatric hospitals, even after the end of the Nazis’ ‘euthanasia’ operations.

It was 4 April 1945, my twenty-third birthday. Frau Koch was very ruffled. ‘You’ll understand that I can’t give you a birthday present in these crazy circumstances,’ she told me aggressively, adding, ‘It’s as much as I can do to wish you a happy birthday.’

‘Of course I understand entirely. And many thanks for your birthday wishes,’ I replied. She was in a terrible situation, and so was I.

The house was very crowded. There was just a small living room, with a door into the bedroom, as well as a verandah and a stuffy attic to be reached only by climbing a kind of chicken-house ladder. That was where I slept.

During the day I had to hide. I sat in a corner of the room that had once been my parents’ bedroom as if nailed to the spot. I couldn’t be seen from outside there, even if anyone had looked straight through the window. I was condemned to total inactivity, and could do nothing to occupy my time but read the books I found in a Biedermeier-style glass-fronted cupboard in that room. Frau Koch would probably have liked to slap my face. She was worked half to death, and exhausted. Going shopping meant hours of torture, now that permission had been given for people to use all the coupons on their ration cards. ‘Buy what you like, as long as the supplies in the shops hold out,’ we were told. Hoarding was the order of the day.

Sometimes I saw Hannchen Koch turn pale and hold on to a piece of furniture to keep herself from falling over. ‘No, it’s nothing,’ she groaned when I ran to support her. I was ashamed of myself for being unable to help her, but I also thought it was not of the least significance to keep all the floors sparkling clean in these topsy-turvy circumstances. Even sand crunching underfoot wouldn’t have bothered me.

There was no wood available either, and thus no coffins. None the less, Frau Koch had taken it into her head to give her mother a dignified burial. She went all over the district to see if she could find a coffin somewhere. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry about all this,’ I said dutifully. ‘If only I could help you by going on some of those trips myself.’ But of course she could tell that, secretly, I was thinking: we are near the end of the most terrible war and the greatest murder of the Jews ever known in human history, and it is relatively unimportant whether a woman who has been mentally ill for decades is buried in a coffin or not. It seemed to me ridiculous for Hannchen Koch to be wearing herself out looking for one, cycling all over the place to see acquaintances of acquaintances, and now and then having to go into other people’s shelters because the air-raid warnings kept sounding.

Once, we had potato dumplings and roast rabbit for Sunday lunch. That was a banquet by the standards of the time. Frau Koch had asked a neighbour to kill a rabbit for her. Her father, who hadn’t really been looked after properly for years, fell on it avidly. He talked about almost nothing but food anyway. The potato dumplings were a good size, he said, although they ought really to be as big as babies’ heads. In his greed he didn’t use cutlery but ate with his bare hands, swallowing a dumpling to the accompaniment of disgusting sounds. Emil was sitting at the table too, showing proper table manners and making a few remarks in his kind, friendly way. At that Frau Koch, whose temper was no longer in a normal state, told her husband off, suddenly rose from the table and kissed her father on both cheeks.

I often thought that getting away from that place at last would be another kind of liberation. But I was dependent on the Kochs, so I sat on my chair and let Hannchen make poisonous comments: ‘I only wish I could just sit about reading!’

‘Hannchen, please try to understand me. What can I do about it?’ I tried desperately to explain my situation to her. But she knew it herself. She simply no longer had her anger under control. I felt like an elephant compared to this delicate and utterly debilitated woman.