Underground in Berlin (42 page)

Soon after the end of the war, a delegation from Hannchen Koch’s laundry went to see her to make her an offer. The managing director of the laundry, a man called Birkholz, had been a Nazi and was to be dismissed. Frau Koch was known to be a campaigning anti-Fascist and a reliable member of the laundry staff, and the delegation had picked her as his successor.

I was sitting in the next room when the endless discussion took place, and I couldn’t help hearing it all. Hannchen Koch didn’t want to accept. ‘I want some peace at last, I want to recover and be a housewife,’ she kept saying. When the delegation had gone, I tackled her on the subject. ‘Hannchen, I think you’re taking the wrong path.’ And I added, as a joke, ‘You may yet be Minister of Laundries.’ Then she broke down in floods of tears, and this time they were genuine. ‘I don’t want all that any more, I don’t want a job or a career. I want to bottle fruit and have a good sleep,’ she sobbed. ‘I want to get my strength back, and I want to do some nice needlework in bright colours.’ At that moment I felt so sorry for her that I was really moved.

The managing director of the laundry had been one of my father’s clients, and he was not an anti-Semite. He had worn the Party badge only because his career meant he had to. It was he who had provided the hundred marks of travel money that I had kept in my shoe on the way to Bulgaria, the money that had made it possible for me to return to Berlin. Later, through Hannchen Koch, he asked me to certify in writing that he had helped me. I made out a testimonial for a W. Birkholz, and Hannchen added his address.

Later on I heard from Trude Neuke, who was now living in a little terraced house in Britz. ‘Who’d have thought it? There’s a fellow who was once a really dangerous SS man called Birkholz living just round the corner from here. A Jewish woman actually gave him a testimonial saying that he had helped her in the war. And the bastard was denazified.’ That man was also called W. Birkholz, but he had a different first name; he was Werner instead of Walter, or the other way around. And he had come by his denazification dishonestly, through his brother or cousin – in fact, the man who really had once helped me.

I once went back to the building where I had lived for almost two years. The Czech greengrocers who had been our neighbours were still lodging in the first-floor apartment, which had suffered least from the bomb dropped in the air raid. Frau Knížek told me that Kurt Blase and Alexander Grass had died fighting with the Volkssturm territorials at the very end of the war, and that Frau Grass had suffered a stroke and was now in a care home in Mariendorf.

I was particularly upset by the news of Alexander Grass’s death. He had done so much for me! And at last the hard shell that I had grown round my feelings broke apart. In a terrible kind of simplification, I had had only friends or enemies over the last few years. The great danger, and thus the general criterion by which I judged, had been the Gestapo. I hadn’t minded who died or lived in the war. At last I understood how much undeserved suffering the war had brought to non-Jews and Jews alike.

It was Emil Koch who finally put an end to my difficult situation in Kaulsdorf. He had made friends with a couple of physicists, husband and wife, who lived in a rather better residential district on the Müggelsee, Berlin’s largest lake. He had probably been going round there offering his services as a handyman or a gardener; he went all over the place looking for work at this time. Anyway, he discussed the awkward state of affairs in his little wooden house with this couple.

From now on his constant refrain was ‘The physicists said’ this, that or the other. The physicists had also looked at Adolf Guthmann’s allegedly bombed-out house, which heartily amused them. They and Emil made a plan together: first
Vadder
must have his house put in order, and then
Vadder
needed a new wife. Emil already had his eye on someone.

There were some Romanian refugees camping unofficially on the attractive meadow outside our door. He had been looking for a woman among them who was the right age for his father-in-law. She was to cook for him, live with him and share his pension. From a distance, he showed me the woman recommended to him. She wore long, colourful, full skirts that looked like part of a national costume. He introduced her to his father-in-law and the two of them lived together for the rest of their lives.

Emil also knew about my promise to his wife. With the help of the physicists, he devised a way to get me out of it. One evening, when I was standing in the kitchen doorway, he began giving me directions from where he was in the garden. ‘We’re going to do something amusing. You go a little way to the right and then walk forward.’ After that he took a run up, lifted me from the ground and whirled me round in a circle. ‘And now I’m throwing you out,’ he said, laughing.

Then we went for a little walk together. ‘That was only a joke, of course,’ he explained. ‘But I’m the head of this household, and if I throw you out I’m the higher authority and you don’t have to keep your promise. Of course you can take all the time in the world over leaving.’ I was secretly jubilant. ‘I’ll go off tomorrow and look for a place of my own,’ I told him, although he was sceptical about my chances.

When we came back, he told Hannchen, ‘I’ve thrown Mariechen out, and now the two of us can have some peace and quiet again.’ His wife reacted surprisingly sensibly. All she said was, ‘That’s all right. Things have to go back to normal some time.’

The house where I had grown up was no longer standing; 19a Prenzlauer Strasse had been razed to the ground. So where was I to go? I knew that Pankow was one of the few parts of Berlin that were still largely intact. Not many bombs had fallen there. While the streets and pavements in other districts were still covered with rubble, you could walk round Pankow for a long time without even noticing that a war had been going on. Furthermore, it was the home of my only living relation, Uncle Karl.

So I set out on the journey to Pankow next day. The housing office for that district occupied a single large room, where the clerks sat at several large tables. Among them, to my surprise, I saw Tati Kupke, my aunt Mia’s sister. She was considered an anti-Fascist who had proved her worth, and so although she had really been a manual worker in the past she was co-opted into this improvised office. We were both very glad to see each other again. At this moment, what had happened between her husband Willi and me when Tati gave me shelter for a few nights didn’t matter. It was three years ago; she didn’t mention it, and nor did I.

‘I’d like to move to Pankow,’ I told her. ‘There are no apartments in Berlin itself, and Uncle Karl at least lives here.’

‘I’m afraid there’s a rule that you can only claim residence where you used to live before,’ she told me. She fell silent for a moment. We were not alone in the room. Then she went on, ‘But of course that applies to you.’ And in a whisper she told me the name of the only street in Pankow that had been mainly destroyed, and the numbers of the buildings in it. I would have to give one of those addresses to get a permit to see apartments to let in Pankow. No one would be able to check whether I had ever really lived there.

Then she went to find her boss and ask him to let me have the permit at once. I was from Pankow, she told him, I was Jewish, I had gone into hiding to survive the war, and had been bombed out.

‘I badly need peace and quiet,’ I added. ‘I don’t just want a room, I want an apartment of my own.’

‘Out of the question,’ said Tati’s boss. ‘You’re a nice girl, young lady, and you are certainly a victim of Fascism. But there are whole families who can’t get anything but emergency accommodation here – just a single room, furnished or unfurnished.’

‘Even if it’s only a stable or a shed, I want to be on my own,’ I repeated desperately. These words struck a chord of some kind in the man. ‘How sad,’ he murmured, and repeated several times, ‘A stable or a shed.’

‘Don’t you at least have something the matter with your lungs? Do you suffer from tuberculosis?’ he asked me.

‘Not that I know of,’ I said regretfully.

In the end it turned out that Tati couldn’t offer anyone an apartment anyway. But she gave me a number of permits to view accommodation that I could show to prospective landlords, and I set off with those.

I went through all the addresses, and they were all useless. They included, for instance, a room with a wall badly damaged by a shell. It had a hole half a metre wide above the bed. The landlady was delighted when I turned up. ‘I sleep on the other side of this hole,’ she said, ‘so now we can say good morning and good night every day. I get very lonely, you see.’ Then she hurried round to the other side of the hole in the wall and called, ‘Cuckoo!’ through it. She obviously didn’t have all her marbles.

‘No, that won’t do,’ I said firmly. ‘I need a room with its walls intact.’ To get out of this difficulty I said untruthfully, ‘My boyfriend would be practising the trumpet here.’ I had trouble shaking the woman off, and had to be impolite to get away from her.

By the end of that very hot day, I was exhausted. The sun was already low in the sky, and I had only one viewing permit left, for a room in Binzstrasse. I went there and rang the bell, but no one came to the door. Through a ground-floor window, however, I could see a man sitting down and shaving himself. Later I found out that his name was Levy. He was a Catholic, but he had Jewish forebears.

‘You can ring until Easter and Whitsun fall on the same day, she’s stone deaf,’ he told me. ‘What do you want with the old lady?’ I showed him the viewing permit and told my story.

‘Maybe you’d better ask Rühle the architect. He has his office right opposite, and the whole corner building belongs to him,’ said Herr Levy. ‘Rühle was always against the Nazis, and he’s helped a lot of people. Perhaps he’ll have something for you.’

I went to the architect’s office and met him right away: an elderly gentleman with a fine-featured, clever, kindly face. Briefly, I explained myself. ‘What luck that it’s not too late to help you out,’ he said, for he had an idea. He told me that one of his single-room apartments was rented by an old lady who had spent the whole war out in the country. She had come to Pankow only once a year to make sure that the building was still standing. ‘Since she’s made herself at home in her village for so long,’ Rühle decided, ‘she might as well stay there, and you can move into the apartment. I’ll make sure it’s all right with the housing office.’

Then he climbed to the top floor of the building with me to show me the little corner apartment. It consisted of a bedroom that was all peculiar angles, and a kitchen that could also be used as a living room. I was delighted.

‘When could I move in?’ I asked. He handed me the key and said, ‘Right away. We’ll draw up the agreement later. For now, let me wish you peace and happiness here.’ I clutched the key, wondering if I was awake or dreaming.

Back in his office, he asked me to tell him a little about the time I had spent in Berlin since going underground. I was happy to do that, because it was a relief to me to talk about it. In return, he told me this and that about his own life, and something odd happened: he several times used the subjunctive mood in indirect speech. It was three years since I had heard that grammatical feature of educated High German, and I had to turn away to hide my emotion. I was moved to tears to meet with the kind of language that was familiar to me from my parental home and my schooldays.

Then it was high time for me to set off back to Kaulsdorf. On the way I held the bunch of keys firmly in my hand, looking at it again and again as if it were a precious jewel.

The Kochs welcomed me warmly. ‘Back so late?’ I had only just managed to return before curfew.
*
At first Emil could hardly believe that I had actually been successful. I had an apartment of my own, and I could move in at once.

I moved out of the Kochs’ house next day. This time I had to go all the way from Kaulsdorf on foot, since I had a handcart to push. I had found a pair of sandals, but they were uncomfortable because they didn’t fit properly, so I decided to walk barefoot to the former capital city of the German Reich.

‘I’m going to equip you as if you were my own child,’ announced Frau Koch, packing a quilt, pillows, bed-linen, cutlery, a whisk and other household items into the handcart. As she did so, she kept enumerating all the things of which she was depriving herself so that she could give them to me. I felt annoyance secretly rising in me: in spite of all this fuss, after all, she was giving me only a tiny fraction of what had once been my parents’ household goods.

Two silver teaspoons also went into the cart. ‘We’ve always been poor,’ Frau Koch told me, ‘we had only these two solid silver spoons. I’ve treasured them since my childhood, and now I’m giving them to you as your dowry.’ That was total nonsense: the initial of our family’s surname was unmistakably engraved on those spoons!

The full extent of her delusions was clear yet again at that moment. For years she had tormented me by announcing again and again, in a solemn voice, ‘We are one and the same being, because we bear the same name and our birthdays are on the same day. Your soul belongs to me.’ On the one hand she had lent me her identity, and on the other she had identified completely with my family; in her mind she was not Johanna Elisabeth Koch, née Guthmann, but a Jalowicz and therefore Jewish. However, I had never before heard anything so remote from reality as the nonsense she was talking now, at the moment of farewell. And at last it was quite obvious: this had to be the end of our association.

‘I’ll bring you back the handcart at the weekend,’ I said, trying to sound affectionate and naïve. ‘And of course you’ll always be like foster parents to me. I’ll come and see you every Sunday.’

‘Never mind all that. I know what life is like,’ said Emil, grinning. ‘You’ll come two or three Sundays running, then once a month, then once every six months and after that never again.’

I had planned to do three things on the long walk ahead of me. The first was to think of how, all those years ago, my parents had been given those silver spoons as a wedding present by Aunt Hulda, my grandmother’s sister.