Underground in Berlin (10 page)

‘You mean there’s a law like that? Well, I’ll be blowed if I ever heard the like of it!’ Only the younger officers had enough self-control to avoid showing clearly how surprised and repelled they felt. The older men shook their heads. ‘Come on, there’s no such thing. What was it you said again?’

‘I am a Jewess, place of registration Berlin, registration number so-and-so.’

‘And saying all that stuff is supposed to be the law?’

This taught me that not even the police force knew about all the legal regulations and petty acts of harassment that beset us as Jews. Ordinary citizens knew even less about them. The average German housewife was interested in finding out where she could get half a kilo of tomatoes on the black market at not too exorbitant a price, and would burst into tears if her soup was burned. She might or might not have anti-Semitic clichés in her head, but she was not aware of the oppressive regulation of Jews. That gave me an insight into the facts that proved to be important in my later life underground.

The question that I asked the policeman after this preliminary skirmish ran: ‘Can you tell me how to get from here to X Street?’

I had always chosen a destination kilometres away. ‘That’s a long way off. You’ll have to go by public transport,’ was the reply.

‘We can’t, we’re not allowed to use public transport except going to and from work on weekdays.’
*

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘It’s so, it really is the law.’

‘Well, if you can’t use transport then you’ll have to walk. But good heavens, it’s such a long way!’

The street map of the city was unfolded, and it was clear at once that our way passed through the governmental district. Nora had worked it all out that way in advance.

‘We’re not allowed to go along those streets. Jews are forbidden there,’ I explained. We were prohibited from setting foot not only in cinemas and theatres, but also in streets and squares in that part of the city.

‘You mean you can’t go by that route? Then it will be even further.’

Here we got the policeman to work out a long way round, we thanked him politely, and walked away. The whole scene was repeated a little later somewhere else.

‘Oh, come on!’ said one of these police officers, and he wasn’t even an old one. ‘You’re three nice girls, no one would know you were anything else just from looking at you. Take that bloody star off, hop on the underground and there you are!’ That was the most forceful answer we received, and it had a very encouraging and reassuring effect on us.

This game mattered a great deal to me, for it taught me to appear self-confident even when I was facing those of whom we genuinely lived in constant fear. It was to help me all the time I was living through the Nazi period.

Yet again and again I realised that any small infringement of the rules could put me in mortal danger. There was shopping, for instance; Jews could go into shops only at a certain time late in the afternoon, when everything was already sold out. However, I often went there in the morning; after all, I had nothing else to do.

Once, when I was strolling down Schmidstrasse with my Jewish star on display, carrying a net shopping-bag, a small, hunchbacked man with a sallow complexion came towards me. ‘Stop!’ he said, taking an official pass out of his pocket. ‘Ministry of Food! You must know that Jews aren’t allowed to go shopping except in the afternoon. I’m having you arrested!’

That would have been disastrous, and I wasn’t holding anything useful – not even a bottle, or I could have cracked him over the head with it and then taken to my heels. My heart was racing. I took two or three steps back, so that he wouldn’t notice how agitated I was, and said, ‘I’m working shifts. I’m on the night shift.’

‘Indeed?’ he said. ‘Let’s see your identity card.’

‘I don’t have it on me.’

‘Then I’m arresting you.’

Instinctively I let my knees give way a little, hunched my upper body and put back my head, so that I could look up at him. ‘Oh, it’s so kind of you to point that out! I didn’t think, I mean I never knew I had to have my identity card on me at all times. It’s really nice of you to tell me, because if I hadn’t met such a kind official I might really have been in trouble.’

A conflict of feelings showed in the man’s expression: he didn’t know whether to be pleased or angry, spit at me or put his arm round me. He hesitated for a moment, then wagged an admonishing finger and said, ‘Well, you know now. So mind you have that identity card on you next time!’

I had survived that encounter. Once again, I had been lucky. But I went straight home and made up my mind not to go about wearing the wretched star all the time any more.

I knew where to find what we called the transit buildings. Using them in summer was no problem; if you wore a lightweight jacket with the star on it, you just disappeared into a corridor in one of these buildings, took off your jacket, and left the house by a different exit without it. In winter, of course, that didn’t work.

My friend Irene Scherhey’s mother taught us how to sew on a star so that you could rip it off with a single movement, and then sew it on again at lightning speed later, using a ready-threaded needle hidden somewhere in the lining of your coat. From then on I walked around the area where I lived with the star duly displayed on my clothes, but loosely attached to them. Ten minutes later I was a free woman, without a star. On the way back I restored my appearance to suit the rules.

Merely covering up the star could have terrible consequences. I witnessed such a scene in Neue Schönhauser Strasse. ‘Stop!’ two men in civilian clothes ordered an old man just a few steps ahead of me. Then I heard the click of handcuffs. The old man, who did look very Jewish, had neither ventured to go out without his star nor to wear it openly as the regulations required. Instead, he had been holding a briefcase pressed so close to his body that half the star was covered. That was reason enough to have him arrested and taken away.

In the winter of 1941–1942 the threat of danger settled round my neck like a noose and kept tightening. Fear had me in its clutches. I wanted to save myself, but I had no idea how.

I often had nothing to do all day. Then I would go all over the city, visiting even people I hardly knew to find out all that I could. I constantly heard bad news: someone had been taken away here, someone else had just had his deportation order there. I was so starving and desperate that I would do a little relaxation exercise in the stairway of a building before I rang the doorbell of whoever I was going to visit. If the door was opened I would say quickly, ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t want to keep you, but I simply couldn’t pass by without looking in to ask how you are.’ Usually I had some entertaining bit of news ready, a little gossip to cheer up my intended host, and if I was in luck I would get a cup of ersatz coffee and a biscuit, or some other small thing to eat.

One day I went into the Konditorei Dobrin. This café had once been among the smartest in Berlin. You went to Dobrin’s in Königstrasse after a shopping expedition on Saturday afternoon. There was still a branch of it, not quite so fashionable, on the Hackescher Markt; the customers there were now exclusively Jewish. I had heard that there was a little diversion to be found in this branch of the café, and you could get a cup of ersatz coffee for a few pfennigs.

I went in alone, as indeed I went everywhere on my own. When I opened the door, I was looking at a room full of men in ski caps. I had a great dislike of that kind of headgear: its basic shape was like the SA cap, and at the same time it had become part of the uniform of the now despised Jews. The earflaps of the cap could be tied up with a thin string like a kind of shoelace. With these little bows on top of them, the ski caps looked so silly that I felt like knocking them off the heads of the Jewish workers and crying, ‘Do something, why don’t you? Don’t go about in uniform, all of you wearing the same sheep’s clothing!’ Unfortunately they were no wolves in the sheep’s clothing, only the meekest of sheep.

I sat down, ordered and drank my ersatz coffee. And suddenly I found myself in the grip of anger. I had a feeling that the Gestapo might march into this pigsty at any moment. The word ‘pigsty’ really did come into my head, and I looked at the floor in embarrassment – however, it was properly swept and polished. What I had noticed was not outward dirt, but the inner filth of this ersatz-coffee society.

A man who had kept his ski cap on bellowed to another one, right across several tables, ‘Heard this one? There’s this apartment where a different Jewish family lives in each room, and there’s this twelve-year-old girl reading a book. So she asks her father, “Papa, what’s a comet?”

“So Papa says, “A comet is a star with a long tail.”

‘Then the girl says, “Uncle Rosenthal in the next room is a comet.” ’
*

Roars of laughter. I felt nauseated. At that moment I decided that whatever happened to these people, it wasn’t going to happen to me. I wouldn’t go along with them.

A man who didn’t wear a ski cap was sitting close to me. There was a hat hanging on the coat-stand near him. I said to him, ‘Do you mind my asking if that is your hat?’

‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘That’s an odd question.’

‘May I ask you a favour? Would you escort me out of this café, just as far as the street?’

He looked at me as if I had gone mad, and so I had in a way: mad with fear and revulsion. I put my few coins for the ersatz coffee on the table, with a tip, and he escorted me to the door. I felt a need to be accompanied safely out, and I was glad once I was back in the street again.

How often had my father quoted from
Pirkei Owaus
–
Sayings of the Fathers
– ‘Do not separate yourself from the community!’ But what I had just seen, downgraded and in the process of dissolution, condemned to death, was no longer my community. I wanted no part of it.

Toni Kirschstein was one of the few people with whom I still had regular contact in the spring of 1942. I had first met her on a Sunday walk with my father. As we were passing the Jewish Cultural League’s theatre in Kommandantenstrasse, a matinée cinema showing had just come to an end. Members of the audience were spilling out into the street.

‘Hello!’ A lady with fair, curly hair and a pretty face greeted us as she left the cinema.

The Eger family had known Dr Antonie Kirschstein for many years. She was married to a school friend of my uncle Herbert. This man, Felix Kirschstein, had never learned any useful professional skills, but liked the good life. Young Antonie, who came with a large dowry, was just the thing for him. He married her, but was consistently unfaithful to his wife for years. By the time I met her they had long been divorced.

Toni Kirschstein was anything but the ideal of the good, domestic little woman. After completing her training as an opera singer, she had made a name for herself as an expert neurologist and psychiatrist. When she smiled she was beautiful; dimples showed in her cheeks, and you could see her regular teeth. But as soon as she stood up it was obvious that she had severe difficulty in walking. She had congenital dislocation of both hips and walked with what is known as a duck gait; she would push one leg out in front of her in a wide arc, then bring up the other behind it.

When we met outside the cinema, she was arm in arm with a man whom she introduced by saying, ‘Meet Pope Leo XXII.’ The man’s first name was Leo, and as she herself remarked, he was the twenty-second man with whom she had had an amorous relationship. She was entirely uninhibited in showing off about the number of men she had slept with.

I was immediately fascinated by her. My parents were not prudes, but I cannot imagine that my mother would have liked to be acquainted with Toni Kirschstein in the old days. However, my mother was no longer alive, and the crazy time in which we were living meant that people drew closer together and set less store on the traditional conventions. So we stood outside the cinema for a while, talking, until Toni Kirschstein said, ‘We can’t put down roots here, but I live quite close.’ In fact it was in Neue Jakobstrasse, and she told us to drop in and see her as soon as possible, so that we could chat in more comfort, adding that she could always spare a cup of ersatz coffee, and that was the beginning of the friendship.

Later on, it was she who had helped me to find my room with the Jacobsohns. She herself had to give up her own apartment, and moved with her son, who was slightly younger than me, to the apartment of a distinguished old lady near Sophie-Charlotte-Platz who sublet part of it to her. This landlady of hers had once been very rich. Her husband had travelled all over the world, bringing home valuable hand-made objects. Toni Kirschstein, who was no longer allowed to practise as a doctor, didn’t have a penny, and she quite often abstracted something from the cabinet of travel souvenirs and sold it on the black market. When her landlady noticed, she would screech, ‘This is outrageous! You’re a thief!’

‘What else am I to do, you silly old bat?’ Toni would snap back. I was once present at one of these quarrels. It was terrible. Her lax morals were one side of Toni Kirschstein, her great generosity another; she would share her last piece of bread with her son and me.

A sociable circle regularly met at her place, and I was happy to be part of it. That was how I came to know Dr Ludwig Dahlheim, an elderly gentleman from a highly assimilated Jewish family. He had rather affected manners, and often mentioned having been a pupil at the elite Königliche Wilhelm grammar school, popularly known as ‘the patent-leather-boots academy’. His wife Thea, née Toller, was a niece of the famous dramatist Ernst Toller. The Dahlheims also had Ludwig’s sister living with them; she was known as Hildchen, and was severely mentally handicapped. The Dahlheim family had always been ashamed of her, kept her hidden away and sometimes actually locked her in her room.

Once, however, when they had a very distinguished aristocratic visitor, things went wrong. A communicating door had been left unlocked, it suddenly opened, Hildchen came in and went over to a valuable figurine of a dog standing on the mantelpiece. She made a deep curtsey, laughed in her weak-minded way and said, ‘The lion won’t hurt little children. The lion is a German animal!’ and with that the secret was out.