Underground in Berlin (15 page)

Once Sylvia stayed with us in Prenzlauer Strasse for a few weeks. She was going to make herself useful by baking something, and my mother suggested a cake in a circular ring mould, telling her the ingredients: half a kilo of flour, about a hundred grams of butter and four eggs.

‘What?’ cried Sylvia. ‘Four eggs? My God, what a mean little recipe!’ A cake as she made it, she said, began with a batter consisting of the yolks of thirty-six hard-boiled eggs pounded.

My mother lost her temper when Sylvia put on such airs. ‘What a bloodsucker you are!’ she said angrily. Thereupon Sylvia left the apartment, slamming the door and without her coat, although it was winter. We worried about her, but she was back an hour later.

In the early Nazi period, Sylvia planned to leave Germany and move in with her brother Max in London. However, apparently his wife Bobby harassed, insulted and exploited her so much that she returned to Berlin a few months later. By a dispensation of Providence she even got back her old furnished room with two ancient old ladies in Wilmersdorf.

Among the absurdities of the war years was the fact that Sylvia finally got a proper paid job. She was employed by a half-Jewish man called Hofer who was a silversmith, and ran a workshop making costume jewellery, which was very popular at the time. You could bring him an old silver spoon or something similar, and he would make it into a pendant or a bracelet. There was nothing of the kind to be bought in the shops.

Sylvia did all the office work in this business. Her boss was living with a lady whom he couldn’t marry because she was fully Aryan. Once, when I visited Sylvia in the silversmith’s workshop, she introduced me to this lady – or rather, introduced us the other way round. ‘I’m so glad that I can introduce our Fräulein Richold to you,’ she told me. Elisabeth Richold was old enough to be my mother, so I should have been introduced to her. She was a full-bosomed, very attractive woman. The expression on her face slipped briefly, but she tried not to let it show.

When we were alone I asked Sylvia, ‘How could you do a thing like that? Introducing a much older woman to me as if she were a servant.’

‘Well, and is she anyone in particular?’ replied Sylvia. This was one of her favourite phrases, indicating that the person addressed was not in fact anyone in particular.

That summer of 1942, Sylvia concentrated all the love she had no longer been able to give her four children on me. She became central to my life, making visits on which I could no longer venture. For instance, she went to see Toni Kirschstein to tell her that I had disappeared. And somewhere in a winding street she found a dusty little stationery shop which still sold something very important to me: ink-erasing fluid, which had been taken off the market long ago and was strictly forbidden because it could be used in forging documents. But the saleswoman didn’t know that, and was glad to get rid of her old stock at last.

When we were drinking tea together one day, Sylvia got to her feet and announced, ‘I am going to tell you something that will astonish you, and you mustn’t forget it. I’ve lost everything, I have that terrible flight behind me, and I have never seen my children again. But I know one thing very well, and it’s the sum of my experience of life: the Bolsheviks were right.’ That has influenced me for the rest of my life.

My plan to go to Bulgaria set Sylvia thinking along her own characteristic lines. ‘You need a first-class trousseau,’ she said. ‘You can’t go without an evening dress. Pea-green silk would be nice.’

She planned to embark on a major business deal to provide this trousseau. She had a friend who was also Bulgarian, one Herr Todorov who lived in the same building and worked in a tobacconist’s. At a guess, the man was seventy, and I couldn’t help noticing that she was in love with him. She herself was around sixty, but still had an erotic and very passionate nature.

She gave all she had to the charming Herr Todorov. Doing small deals – getting hold of ten cigarettes somewhere and selling them on at a few pfennigs more – was not in Sylvia’s style. She wanted to bring off a really big coup, and it led to her being handed over to the authorities by the man concerned.

I heard about it because Sylvia had arranged for me to talk to Herr Todorov. We were to meet at a certain bench in the Tiergarten. She was sure that it would be extremely useful to me to discuss life in Bulgaria with an educated and well-to-do Bulgarian.

He was to be carrying a sign by which I could recognise him, but that wasn’t necessary. I knew who he was before he reached me. He looked exactly as I had imagined him from Sylvia’s description: a very good-looking, white-haired gentleman entirely clad in pale grey. He was obviously a shady character. Poor Sylvia, I thought, she’s fallen for a Lothario.

And even from a distance I saw how the corners of his mouth turned down in disappointment. I was not his sort of woman. My poverty was obvious, and I was shabbily dressed.

We exchanged a few civilities, and then he said, in a strong Slav accent, ‘Asarch is locked up.’

Locked up? I gaped stupidly at him and asked, ‘What did you say?’

‘Is locked up,’ he repeated.

He must have denounced her, thereby ridding himself of her, one or two days after she had given him all her money. I was to go to his house with him, he said, and he would give me a piece of bread. Feeling dazed, I followed him to Schaperstrasse. He kept me waiting in the doorway of his room. Opposite the door stood his desk with its drawer open, and I saw Sylvia’s ring inside it. I liked that ring very much, and had often admired it: it was so large that it spread above the lowest joint of her middle finger, and was very beautifully made, with a setting of tiny birds pecking at jewelled splinters. If only because of its filigree craftsmanship, the ring was very valuable.

My last doubts were gone. He had even cleared out her apartment. With an idiotic grin, he turned to me and closed the desk drawer with his behind. Then he gave me a piece of bread. It was so hard that Ida Kahnke and I worked away at it with hammer and chisel, and still we couldn’t cut it up small. Although it was all so terrible, we laughed until we cried.

In addition Herr Todorov gave me two pairs of knitted stockings. The thick material would never fit smoothly, but ‘absorbed water’, as people said, meaning that they got wrinkles in them. Poor as I was, I couldn’t wear such things. I gave them to Ida Kahnke. ‘To think there are still knitted stockings!’ Delighted, she burst into fits of bleating, old-lady laughter.

Next day I went first to the silversmith’s workshop where Sylvia had worked. I told Elisabeth Richold what had happened.

‘How could she do such a thing?’ she sighed. ‘A Soviet Jewish lady dealing with a profiteer like that?’ After Sylvia’s arrest the jewellery workshop had also been searched.

‘She didn’t do it for herself,’ I said. ‘She did it for me.’

Frau Richold burst into tears. ‘I’m glad you told me that. Sylvia Asarch is rather eccentric, but this shows her in a very different light. I didn’t know she was such a good person.’

I never saw Aunt Sylvia again. Many years after the war I happened to be in company where people were discussing Hofer the silversmith’s workshop. One of the women present said, ‘And would you believe it, there was a Soviet Jewish woman called Sylvia, she’d been enviably well protected, but she was so greedy and stupid that she tried dealing with crooks, and that was the end of her.’

I didn’t mention the relationship, but asked, ‘Did the lady survive?’

‘No. I don’t know exactly what happened, but it’s said that she was shot.’

There was a strange atmosphere on the railway platform in Zagreb. I walked uneasily up and down, waiting for the storm to break. A curiously ominous wall of purple cloud hung over the station, but when I turned round I looked up at a bright blue summer sky.

Then torrents of rain fell. A few moments later a double rainbow stretched in front of the dark clouds, shining in glorious colours such as I had never seen before. I felt a deep sense of gratitude, and put up a silent prayer. ‘Thank you for this sign, dear God. The rainbow is a sign of your covenant in the Bible, so you are keeping the covenant with me – which means that I shall live.’

Would I reach my journey’s end? Could I succeed in crossing Bulgaria and Turkey and reaching freedom? It was a question that I had asked myself again and again recently. I was in a state of great nervous tension. The train had kept stopping on the way along the line, we kept having to get out, and when we did reach the next station we had often missed our connection. We were now in Croatia, and I felt very queasy in a country subjugated by the Nazis. I had heard that the fascist Ustaše there were even worse than the SS. I would rather not have got out of the train at all in the Croatian capital, but it felt good to stretch my legs. A little girl of about six danced round us, reaching out her thin arms and begging. We got back into the train, and a few minutes later it moved away towards Sofia.

It was now the middle of September 1942. In my last weeks in Berlin I had been busy getting together the papers I needed for this journey. I began by approaching Herbert Koebner, who created or got hold of the documents needed for escaping from Germany. I knew his son Heinz slightly; he conducted the choir in the Old Synagogue, so I had often seen his face in the pattern, so to speak, cast by the grille behind which the choir sang. He was engaged to a very pretty graphic artist, who lived with the Koebners. Her blonde curls didn’t quite go with her complexion and her brown eyes. She had already gone underground (her name was allegedly Fräulein Henze), and she worked on the practical and technical side of the forgery business, paying great attention to detail.

Ernst Wolff had told me that his cousin needed a highly intelligent and reliable person to act as a test case for his forgeries, and in return would not take any money from me. I felt greatly flattered, and believed him. I discovered the truth about this bargain only much later.

First, however, I had to have documents on which Koebner could work. Hannchen Koch immediately offered to get hold of what was needed. She worked in the office of a co-operative laundry which had a great many customers coming and going, and she stole an identity card from the pocket of a coat hanging up in the corridor there.

By chance the name of the woman it belonged to was Abraham, née Hirsch. Presumably she could prove that she was of pure Aryan descent, but both her surnames sounded decidedly Jewish. Frau Koch immediately realised that I couldn’t use an identity card that would arouse suspicion. ‘It’s a judgement from God,’ she announced. ‘You mustn’t go under the name of Hirsch or Abraham or Schulze, you’d better have my papers. If I’m ever in a situation where I have to show my identity card, I’ll only just have discovered that I’ve lost it.’ For herself, she got what was known as a postal identity card, a substitute which meant that only the postman had to vouch for her identity.
*

She had suffered pangs of conscience in abstracting a stranger’s identity card. It was even harder for her to play the part of the honest finder now, and restore the document to its overjoyed owner. She claimed to have found it on a heap of coal in the yard of the laundry, and made a great fuss over accepting a generous sum of money as the reward.

However, I had another problem with Frau Koch’s papers: she had been born in 1905, and so she was seventeen years older than me. I, on the other hand, barely looked my real age of twenty. Indeed, I was often taken for seventeen and asked whether I was still at school. All that Koebner could do to tone down this discrepancy a little was to make the figure 0 in the date 1905 into a figure 1. That would make me twenty-seven years old, which still was not very likely.

Thanks to the ink-erasing fluid I had bought, the original ink on the identity card could simply be removed. Koebner exchanged the photo of Hannchen Koch for one of me. Fräulein Henze copied the part of the official stamp that came above the photo, along with the eagle and the swastika, using a very fine brush. Everything else remained as it was: from now on I was Johanna Elisabeth Koch, née Guthmann. I was not entirely happy with this maiden name. More Guthmanns were Jewish than Aryan – but I had no real choice in the matter.

So now I had an identity card, but no passport and visa allowing me to travel, and no rail ticket. All these things were hard to procure in the middle of the war. Herbert Koebner therefore thought up a special ruse: he gave me a life as a freelance canteen manageress travelling at her own expense. I would not need a ticket issued by the Wehrmacht for that, and indeed I would not have got one, but I would seem to be vaguely connected with the Wehrmacht, and it was to be hoped that my documents would not be checked so closely.