Underground in Berlin (19 page)

Herbert Koebner, he said, had always been the best and kindest of fathers, a man who loved and respected his wife, and led an exemplary if not strictly orthodox Jewish life. But, said Fritz, he had obviously lost his wits. ‘He’s involved in some kind of business with Gestapo and SS men, making them forged papers just in case the war doesn’t turn out as expected,’ he told me. ‘And he has the crazy notion that this will make him a dollar multi-millionaire. In his mind he’s planning a world cruise for the whole family, looking at atlases and thinking up routes.’ His mother, he added, was in despair. ‘Have you noticed the nasty grin he sometimes has on his face?’ Fritz asked me. I nodded. Something about the man had always seemed odd to me. ‘It must be a symptom of his madness,’ said his son. ‘He never used to grin like that.’

Captain Klaar welcomed us warmly. He was a friendly old gentleman, but he did indeed seem very melancholy. He lived in the basement of a two-storey house, and reassured me by saying that his neighbours were far too cultivated to feel curious or denounce anyone. He had told them, he added, that he had given a woman he knew a key to his apartment, so I wouldn’t need to hide, and must make myself at home. He showed me the kitchen and the larder, the heating arrangements, and his bedroom. He was just about to set off on a river trip lasting several days.

In spite of all he said, I hardly dared to move in his apartment. I kept my hands off his stocks of food, for I was so starved that otherwise I would simply have fallen on them. It was damp and cold in that basement, but I dared not put the heating on. I slept in the unmade bed, and lived solely on a piece of bread and a jar of beans that Frau Koch had given me. After all that I had been through, I felt exhausted and depressed.

I could get away from Kladow only by taking the ferry across the Wannsee. The captain had warned me against the ferryman, saying he was very inquisitive, a shockingly bad character and a fanatical Nazi. Sure enough, the man asked persistent questions when I set off for the city after a couple of days to go and see Frau Koch. He wanted to know where I lived, and questioned me about my family circumstances.

‘Can’t you guess why I’m here?’ I hinted. ‘I mean, you’re not past it yet yourself.’

‘I wonder who the lucky man is,’ he replied. ‘There aren’t many young men around here.’ I was glad when I could get off the ferry.

Then I marched towards the city centre along one of the large, western arterial roads. I wanted to go as much of the way to Köpenick as possible on foot, but I was very hungry. As I came to a café that must once have been very elegant, I decided to stop for a rest. Every restaurant offered what was called a standard dish of the day, for people who didn’t have any coupons on them, usually very poor quality food consisting of swedes and pieces of potato without fat of any kind. It was well known that deserters and other dubious characters who had no food ration cards took up this offer.

What devil got into me, making me go into that café? And what even sillier devil told me not to sit at a small table, but instead go over to a huge slab of oak clearly frequented by the regular customers?

No sooner had I ordered than several well-dressed gentlemen, probably from some official authority, sat down with me. Their glances showed what they thought of the uninvited guest at their table: a harmless madwoman who had lost her way. I ate my dish of the day as calmly as possible, while listening to their conversation. They were talking about Ribbentrop. Then I paid and fled into the open air. That way, I left the gentlemen unsure whether I even knew any German. It had been rash enough to sit at a table with them. When Captain Klaar came back to his apartment after a week away, he was obviously very disappointed. He had expected to return to a comfortable, warm home, with the beds freshly made up and a hot meal on the stove. I explained that I simply hadn’t ventured to touch anything in his apartment. However, it was clear that I couldn’t stay with him any longer. We said a friendly goodbye, wishing one another good luck.

I went back to the centre of Berlin. My route took me straight to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse, where Koebner lived. Hoping that the forger might have thought of a new scheme for me, I climbed the stairs.

But I did not get far. The door of one apartment on the first floor was open just a crack. A white-haired old lady put her head out and whispered, ‘Are you looking for the Koebners?’ It was their helpful neighbour Frau Hansl. She quickly led me into her apartment and closed the door. ‘Gestapo upstairs,’ she breathed into my ear. She had been standing in her front hall in the pitch dark for hours, watching the bottom of the stairs and heading off any visitors to the Koebners.

Looking through the peephole in her door early in the morning, she had seen several people, bound together, being taken downstairs. Now the Gestapo were back again to search the apartment. She had seen little bottles of ink and erasing fluid, paper and other items of equipment from the forger’s workshop being taken away on trays. The Gestapo men could still be heard rummaging around upstairs as we stood in her hall in the dark.

‘Are you the girl my son brought those blank papers back from Warsaw for?’ she asked me quietly. I nodded. Koebner had been furious, she told me, when he heard about my return to Berlin. ‘Silly cow, almost gets to the Turkish border and then comes all the way back again! She should be ashamed of herself!’ However, his wife had raised her own voice and said it was a stroke of sheer genius on my part to get out of Bulgaria alive and without being arrested. ‘If anyone should be ashamed it’s you. Instead of getting properly informed, you make her out a stupid travel order like that, and then spend your time planning those crazy round-the-world trips!’

Now we heard footsteps rapidly going downstairs again. From the window of her front room, Frau Hansl saw the Gestapo men getting into their car and driving away. ‘You can venture out into the street again now,’ she told me.

‘Many, many thanks,’ I said as I turned to leave. Frau Hansl had saved my life. We don’t say thank you often enough for the truly great gifts we are given.

When I emerged from the darkness of that front hall, first into the stairwell and then out into the street, I was dazzled by the daylight. It was as if the sky had fallen, covering the road with a concrete roof from side to side. I felt as if I were caught in a tunnel. I wanted to get away from there, fast. I was afraid of being recognised. But I had to wait until I could see better again. Feeling weak at the knees, I leaned against the wall of a building.

A little later I was running down the steps to the U-Bahn. I was going to Neukölln to see Heller and warn him. He could be in danger now himself. I interrupted him in the middle of his consulting hours, but I managed to speak to him in private for a few minutes.

‘Koebner and his whole family have been arrested,’ I told him breathlessly.

Heller turned pale. ‘It’s very good of you to come and let me know at once,’ he said.

‘As for me, it means there’s no one who can help me to get away now,’ I said. ‘I’ll never find anyone else to forge papers for me – and if I did I couldn’t afford them.’

‘We don’t know whether Koebner would have forged new papers for you anyway,’ replied Heller. ‘After all, your travel order was bought with the Wolff family’s last savings, and at a high price, too.’

This revelation shocked me. I tried not to show my emotions as it dawned on me that, solely out of civility, Ernst Wolff had played on my vanity. Meanwhile his family had paid for me, and had spared me having to thank them – even though they were not particularly fond of me.

Heller went on, without noticing how moved I was. ‘What’s more, Koebner said it was a funny relationship his cousin had with that young girl, meaning you. You’d have been the ideal boy for Ernst Wolff.’

Once again light dawned on me. I had never seen it, but Ernst Wolff was homosexual, and that was why he was a bachelor. It was also why the ladies in his family had been so indignant about our relationship.

Now, of course, I also realised why a group of boys gathered round him in the yard of the Old Synagogue after every service. I had often seen one of the choirboys with Ernst Wolff, a lad called Georg Blumberg. Georg and I were friends after a fashion. He was a little younger than me, and had hinted a couple of times that we had something in common. I had never understood what he really meant.

Georg Blumberg had been one of Ernst Wolff’s boys, then, and so had I. I was in great emotional turmoil, but there was no one in whom I could confide about it.

In his youth, Benno Heller had been on the extreme right of politics. He had belonged to a Christian and Jewish student fraternity, and wore the duelling scar on his face with pride. Later he had changed sides, becoming an enthusiastic communist and intermittently a Party member. After a journey through the Soviet Union with his wife, however, he returned in sober mood, horrified by the conditions that he saw there.

Heller must have left the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany, before 1933. At least, he was never persecuted as a communist. All the same, he was still firmly on the left politically, and in practice as well as verbally he opposed Paragraph 218 of the law, proscribing abortion.

It was therefore not only Jewish women who turned to him when they needed help. The Aryan patients whom he was no longer allowed to treat after 1933 remembered their Jewish gynaecologist when they were in trouble. One of them was Karola Schenk, who lived in the street in Neukölln where Heller’s practice lay, on the corner of Pannierstrasse. He had helped her when she became surprisingly and very inconveniently pregnant, and did not ask for a fee. From then on, however, she was in his debt.

He now reminded her of that. While I waited in his consulting room, Heller went to his former patient and told her that for two weeks he wanted her to take in a Jewish girl who had gone underground. It was only with reluctance that the former circus artiste agreed to shelter me in her apartment. She was no fanatical supporter of the Nazis, but she was a conformist who felt that resistance was unseemly, and took no interest at all in politics. Accordingly, this slightly built and very cultivated lady received me into her home courteously, if coldly.

After I had spent two or three days sitting in a wicker chair, she suddenly thawed, and told me how she had been testing me: she had put tiny pieces of matchsticks in the hinges of all the cupboards to see if I had been opening them when she wasn’t in. She couldn’t bear the idea of someone rummaging through her things, she said. But she herself could hardly have borne to sit idly all day in someone else’s apartment without looking at other people’s property. My exercise of such restraint seemed to her the pinnacle of distinction.

‘Let’s say
du
to each other,’ she offered, ‘and as a reward you can try on all my hats. Any woman would enjoy that!’ She showed me her wonderful hats, made of the finest velours. They were all made-to-measure, none of them were standard goods. I was even allowed to slip into her jackets and skirt suits. I told her how a man had once spoken to me in the street saying he would like to engage me as a model. Apparently I had just the sort of face for modelling hats. He promised me good pay, and I wanted to say yes at once, but my father wouldn’t let me, saying that such work was unseemly and beneath my dignity.

Karola and I soon became close friends. Her family were prosperous Bavarian entrepreneurs, and as a girl she had run away from home several times to join the circus, where she had turned her baptismal name of Karoline into ‘Rola’ and met her husband, stage name Dannas. But finally she had been reconciled to her family, and took a proper training for her work as an artiste. She and her husband had built up a troupe of performers, and while practising their profession lived an ordinary settled married life, just as other couples might run a shop selling soap or a dental practice.

To their great grief, they had no children. So they took on an apprentice, whom they called ‘Boy’. ‘Rola-Dannas-Boy’ sounded as if he came from a circus family, and had an emotional appeal to the public even if the supposed child was in no way related to them.

When Dannas, whose real name was Alfred Schenk, fell severely ill the troupe had to give up performing. Karola took an office job, and nursed her husband with great devotion. Their former apprentice stayed with them, living in half a room in their apartment. It was with him, of all people, a youth who could have been her son, that Karola had begun a brief relationship after her husband’s death, and immediately become pregnant.

After my first few days in her apartment, Karola asked me, ‘How can you bear to sit around on a chair all day doing nothing?’

‘With difficulty,’ I replied, ‘but there’s nothing else I can do.’

‘We’ll find a better solution,’ she said, and she introduced me to her neighbour Ella Steinbock, a seamstress who worked for a firm in the clothing industry and could do with an assistant to sew on buttons and turn up hems. Karola told her I was a circus artiste, but I couldn’t perform because of a knee injury, and would be glad of something to keep me busy.

So now I sat for a few hours a day in a warm, well-lit room, and I even got paid for my work. I didn’t have to hide, I could go to the toilet when I liked, and I could even listen to music on the radio.

Frau Steinbock was very silent. Only when the conversation happened to turn to politics, and the Führer’s name was mentioned, did this lonely and introverted old maid smile in a curiously enraptured way, half-closing her eyes. It was in her that I first encountered the phenomenon of a passionate enthusiasm for Hitler bordering on religious mania.

Karola too worked for a fanatical Nazi. This man, one Herr Lehmann, did official (and also unofficial) business. Since Karola, as his secretary, was a great help to him in it, he allowed her a certain amount of freedom. She didn’t have to observe her timekeeping slavishly, and through her boss she could get black-market goods of which other customers could only dream. Who had a tomato for supper these days, or smoked fish?