Underground in Berlin (9 page)

Finally I found accommodation with a Jewish family at 26 Schmidstrasse, a slum area in the northern part of Kreuzberg, on the border of the Berlin-Mitte district. Siegfried and Franziska Jacobsohn had two very nice adolescent children, Hilde and Werner. The furnished room that I rented from them, however, was a sad joke. It was as thin as a small towel, and gloomy, because the street was so narrow that the sun never shone in. All the concentrated misery of my situation was expressed by this room. The furnishing I found there consisted of a tiny table, a chair, a huge crate meant for furniture removals, and a piano with no strings that barred access to the room next door, which was also rented out.

At first Frau Jacobsohn had even wanted money for the fact that this room was ‘partly furnished’. However, I successfully resisted this demand. I wrote out an agreement covering a page in my notebook and showed it to my guardian, the lawyer Moritz Jacoby. A former partner of my father’s, he could not stop laughing when he looked at this agreement, which was as comprehensive as if I were trying to sell or rent something worth millions.

Then, with the help of Aunt Grete, who was working unpaid for the Jewish Community, I got hold of the furniture I needed. As well as a bed there was a cylinder desk, as it was known: a writing desk with a cylindrical semi-circular drawer that could be closed. I locked my few foodstuffs in this desk; unfortunately, that was necessary because Frau Jacobsohn was envious if, for instance, I bought sausage with my few meat coupons.

‘But Frau Jacobsohn, you get meat for yours,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes, but sausage … my children are so hungry!’ I could understand her, but it was unedifying. All the same, we gradually became friends, and often had long conversations. I had plenty of time now that I was no longer going to work for Siemens every day.

It was only money that I lacked. I was not earning anything, and the pension received by me instead of my father covered my rent and electricity, but not much more. I was so impoverished that I sold my coal coupons in order to buy food. It was horribly cold in winter, but I had decided to go cold and hungry and simply sleep through mealtimes rather than waste my strength doing forced labour.

Aunt Grete was among the first to receive a deportation order in the autumn of 1941. The days before she was taken away were bad. A woman I knew advised me to go with her, saying that we young people must look after our older relations in the concentration camp. Even then, however, instinct told me that all who went there were going to their deaths.

Aunt Grete herself wondered whether we shouldn’t stick together. ‘Won’t you come with me voluntarily? Sooner or later everyone will have to go.’

It was very difficult for me to say no. I felt I was being hardhearted. I could hardly say, ‘You can’t save yourself. But I am going to do everything imaginable to survive.’ All the same, that was what I thought.

Grete was a terribly prickly character, but at heart she had been the kindest and most generous of our family. After my grandfather’s early death, she had continued to run his haulage company with great enterprise and energy. Then, when it went bust during the First World War, she had made her living teaching shorthand and typing and had built up a secretarial and duplication business. She had worked hard to keep not only herself but Uncle Arthur too. After my mother’s death my father and I were often her guests. I always took it for granted that she would look after us all, although my thanks left something to be desired.

We spent the last days before her deportation sitting together all the time. Hour by hour, she tore up old photographs that she could not take with her, but didn’t want to leave behind. It was at this time that she told me, ‘I loved you more than your mother did, but I was never fated to find a husband and have a child.’ And she confessed something else to me: ‘I have loved one man all my life. He was popular with all the women, and he certainly did not return my feelings. He was your father.’ I did not let her see how much this information shook me.

One of her many customers who was also a personal friend of Aunt Grete’s was Herr Hidde. He ran a radio repairs workshop on Alexanderplatz. Because he was tall as a giant, immensely fat and heavily built, you expected his voice to be a deep bass, but it was a high falsetto.

Of course Hidde was an anti-Nazi. When Aunt Grete received her deportation order, he said, ‘Eger, I give you my word of honour: if they try to take you away, then that’s the end of my workshop. You did all the office stuff for me, I can’t manage it on my own, and I don’t want other people meddling. Can’t the two of us emigrate to the North Pole? I’ll catch whales and you can cook them in kosher sauce.’

‘Stop talking nonsense, Hidde,’ replied Aunt Grete. ‘This is deadly serious.’

These last conversations before her deportation were deeply tragic, but at the same time comic. With a tearful expression on her face she kept telling me, ‘On the day they come to take me away, I shall leave a letter for you under the doormat.’ At least ten times, she told me not to forget the letter under the mat.

I felt unspeakably sorry for her, and I would so much have liked to help, but I couldn’t bear it any more. I was even a little relieved when it was over. Her apartment was sealed, and I retrieved the letter from under the doormat. In her best handwriting she had written that our family had always been honest and upright people, and I must remain honest and upright too. She asked for God’s blessing on me, and so on and so forth. My goodness, I thought; so much fuss about that letter.

I read it three times and then tore up the sheet of paper. When I was on my way back from Prenzlauer Strasse to Schmidstrasse, I was ashamed of myself. I felt that I had not grieved enough over Aunt Grete’s farewell.

Desperate people are drawn to the water, or so I imagined, anyway. At nineteen years old I was still very naïve. So I went down to the River Spree, leaned over the rail of the bridge, and groaned dramatically. Whereupon a silly woman wearing a hat with a feather in it passed by, looked at me, looked at the Star of David on my clothing and announced, ‘Oh well, go on, then. It doesn’t matter.’ A Nazi woman didn’t need to show any support for a Jew. At this point a light dawned on me. Stop being so dramatic, I told myself. I was never going to indulge in such artificial spectacles again.

A few days later I was crossing Alexanderplatz and saw that Hidde had been as good as his word. His workshop was closed. A large notice in the display window said, ‘Business closed until the final victory, for want of spare parts.’ This phrasing was obviously intended to be taken as sarcasm, and passers by stopped, grinned and enjoyed the joke.

When I next passed that way, the notice had gone again. I stood outside the shop for a moment, looking round undecidedly. A man spoke to me. ‘Wondering where the notice is, are you?’ he asked. ‘The Party came and said he had to take it out of the window. They accused him of wanting to take the piss out of Germany.’

‘Oh, I really can’t imagine that,’ I said.

In October 1941, Grete was deported to Litzmannstadt. That was the name the Nazis had given to the Polish city of Łódź. After that, I had only a single sign of life from her. I twice sent her ten marks, which was a fortune for me in my circumstances at that time. The first time I got a confirmation that she had received the money, signed by Grete herself. After than I heard no more. There was already a rumour circulating that money sent in that way would never end up in the hands of the intended recipients.

As for Grete, she had meant me to inherit all that she possessed. In the Prenzlauer Strasse apartment, she had kept a collection of wonderful heirlooms from old Russia, above all porcelain and glass items. Of course I never saw any of them again.

Schönfeld, our supervisor at the Siemens works, had warned me that I would be sent to do forced labour again. I could get a medical certificate to cover ten or fourteen days off work, but the employment agency was soon summoning me again.

I simply ignored the first letter, an extraordinarily bold response to the authorities, who counted on all citizens to knuckle under to such demands in their fear of the law. Then I got a card bearing the words ‘Second Demand’. I took it to the agency and said, ‘This is funny! It says Second Demand here, but I never had a first one.’

I was sent to a spinning mill, a small business with what was described as a Jewish department. Before starting work, for some reason or other we had to have a gynaecological examination. An elderly gynaecologist who had a practice of his own in Wühlischstrasse had made an appointment for all of us women and girls to attend at the same time, and kept us waiting for hours. Here I saw the seventeen-year-old twins Hannelore and Rosmarie Herzfeld, whom I knew slightly. They were two years younger than me, were shy and respectful and treated me like an aunt. They even bobbed me a little curtsey.

When the first Jewish woman was called in, there was a difficulty in examining her. The doctor came into the waiting room and asked, ‘Do you all have such full bladders that I can’t get past them?’ We told him, ‘We can’t go to the toilet – there’s only one for patients here, and we don’t know where the Jews’ toilet is.’

He snapped at us in vulgar terms. ‘You idiots, piss is piss and shit is shit! It’s the same for all human beings. Now go off and have a pee one by one.’

Then it was the twins’ turn. He came out of the room where he was examining us and called, ‘A very interesting case, identical twins, both of them virgins, seventeen years old. You must all come and see this!’ His wife and four or five other ladies in good silk dresses – they were having a coffee party – came to see the show. So did a workman, bending his head and kneading his cap in his hand with sheer embarrassment because he felt so awkward.

Work in the spinning mill was terrible. I was put on the night shift, and had to go to work down streets in pitch darkness. I kept stumbling or even falling over in the dark, and the factory hall where we worked was itself very poorly lit.

We women workers stood many metres apart in front of a long wall where I had to keep fitting new spindles and switching the machinery on. The first time I did it, the thread broke at once. The forewoman shouted, ‘That’s verging on sabotage, you stupid cow!’

After a few days I went to the office and told one of the younger members of office staff there, ‘I really am trying to do my best, but I have a nervous illness and the threads keep breaking. You’ll have nothing but trouble with me.’ At that moment the forewoman came in and began shouting at me. ‘We ought to throw this Jewish sow out, stupid creature, she’s not even worth spitting at!’ When she had done something or other in the office she left the room. I told the other staff member, ‘Yes, please do throw me out. You see, I can’t give notice.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said the girl on the office staff. ‘Right, then we’ll fire you. The forewoman said you were incapable of working.’ She immediately made out my papers and, in friendly tones, wished me good luck.

But of course the employment agency got in touch again. I received another demand, and once again I didn’t respond. Then the second came, and I thought that when the third card arrived I would have to go. But it didn’t turn out like that.

Until recently my neighbour in the next room of the Jacobsohns’ house had been Harry Kaplan, a waiter who played the trumpet. When he was taken away for deportation, I had simply gone to bed and pulled the covers over my head in unspeakable fear and desperation. The doorbell rang again while I was alone in the house. The postman had a registered letter for Herr Kaplan. I said, ‘He isn’t here. He’s been taken away.’

‘Oh, then I know what I have to write: gone east, no known address,’ said the postman, an elderly man. ‘And I have something else too; there’s supposed to be a Fräulein Jalowicz living here.’ I recognised the envelope at once; it was another summons from the labour exchange.

‘Then you’d better put the same on it. Gone east, no known address,’ I said quickly.

And so my name was eradicated from the employment agency’s card index because I had the impertinence to tell the authorities that I had already been deported.

I often met Ruth and Nora at the weekend. We went for walks together, and they told me the latest news from the Siemens works. For instance, I learned about the reaction of the tool-setters there when, in 1941, a police decree announced that all Jews must wear a yellow star in public.

Schulz and Hermann had of course been indignant. Even Stakowski, the Nazi, thought poorly of the idea, and two men called Strahl and Bedurcke, whom I always used to confuse with each other, regarding them as convinced Nazis and far from bright, had been heard saying, ‘We’re ruled by criminals!’ One of them had family out in the country, and sometimes brought the girls in Siemens sandwiches from then on.

I gradually developed a particular plan for my walks with Ruth and Nora. I wanted to take the opportunity of exploring the city of Berlin and getting to know its population thoroughly. My two friends were not very keen on joining in my game of sociological experimentation, but they did it for my sake. Nora worked out the routes to various places in the city, all of them a long way from our point of departure. There were various stages where I was going to ask a policeman the way.

I went along the streets with my two dazzlingly beautiful friends one each side of me. Many of the older people stared at the three of us and said, ‘What a shame. Fancy those lovely girls having to wear the Jewish star!’

The policemen were happy to talk to us, too. ‘Well, my lovelies?’ they would ask.

Then I introduced myself exactly as the law stipulated: ‘I am a Jewess, place of registration Berlin, registration number so-and-so. May I ask a question?’

‘What?’ the policeman would say in a broad Berlin dialect. ‘What did you want? What’s that you say?’

‘The law says we have to identify ourselves like that. With a place of registration, a registration number, and pointing out that we’re Jewish. And then, if you allow us, we can ask a question.’