Underground in Berlin (25 page)

Trude had told me her address only once. You didn’t write things down at that time, but I would never have forgotten it: Number 13 Schönleinstrasse in the Kreuzberg district. I happily climbed the stairs. I saw an oval porcelain plaque on the first floor, with the name Neuke on it. When I had rung the bell I heard dragging footsteps coming to the door. A tall, thin man in his forties opened it. A mild smile crossed his stern features, forming dimples in his cheeks. I liked that mixture of severity and human kindness in his face at first sight.

The master of the house, Julius Neuke, was known as Jule. I knew a little more from Inge Hubbe about her stepfather. He was a lathe operator, which meant that he had to do heavy work while standing, but he suffered from leg ulcers that made the job a torment. As a result he often had to be off work sick. His family had a hard time making ends meet financially.

Jule Neuke knew all about me. He steered me into the kitchen. On stepping into it I thought at once: Hello, you nice kitchen! Yet the room was very conventional, neither particularly handsome nor lavishly furnished. But it had an atmosphere in which I immediately felt at ease.

‘Do sit down,’ said my host, offering me a chair. He spoke with such formality that I wondered if he was addressing someone else in the room, but there was no one. Apart from his old-fashioned way of speaking to me, Jule Neuke welcomed me with great warmth. His wife, he said, was in Magdeburg, where she sometimes went to visit her old mother Anna Aernecke and her three sisters, who were still living in their home town. But today the special purpose of her trip, as I guessed, was to look for someone in her extended family who would take me in.

Jule Neuke offered me a cup of ersatz coffee and set off in search of some biscuits hidden in the next room for special occasions. It took him some time to get back. As I waited, my glance fell on a postcard stuck into the frame of the glazed front of the kitchen cupboard. It was obviously from Trude, and I could read only the side showing, but I didn’t want or need to read any more: she had arrived all right, she said, and her mother was well. Then came the news that I read at least ten times; I soon knew what it said by heart. With wonky punctuation, and her own unique mixture of capital and small letters, she had written: ‘Elle, Could but says no. Erna happy To for six weeks.’ I knew at once who and what the meaning of that was.

My relationship with Julius Neuke stayed just as it had been on our first meeting; he was one of the few men who simply liked me without the slightest trace of sexual innuendo. He would never have been pushy. We arranged a time when I could come back, and soon after that I said goodbye.

It was a very cold day, and as I didn’t know how to kill time I soon went back to Gerda Janicke’s apartment. She and Eva were surprised to see me home so early. I told them an untruthful story: it had all gone well, I had asked after Frau Klemmstein and been told the way to her as soon as I reached the village. I had asked Gerda Janicke in advance what problems interested her and her friends in particular. One of her acquaintances, a young widow, wanted to know if there would be a new love in her life. I thought up remarks that might refer to the subjects they suggested in some way, and told them, with much stammering and stuttering and pauses for thought, what the fortune teller had allegedly said. It went down very well indeed. They were all happy, I had had a day off, had eaten something, and made twenty marks for myself.

I was beginning to get my self-confidence back, and my relationship to the other two women in the apartment also improved. One day they said they would like to go to the cinema. A film with Marika Rökk was showing, and at this time everyone wanted to see it. People longed for something to take their minds off reality, and long lines formed outside the cinemas. Even in great cold or driving rain, they were ready to queue for several hours with the prospect of such enjoyment ahead.

I loved to see these kitschy films myself. I identified with the women stars, imagining myself in their wonderful dresses, dancing gracefully through ballrooms. Meanwhile a second part of my mind was closely analysing the political ideology of the films, which were designed to encourage the populace to see things through while also looking for such diversions, and I despised the sentimentality served up by the Nazis.

So I went to stand in line and get tickets for the two ladies. After I had waited in the cold for hours, someone came out of the cinema and called, ‘Please don’t wait any longer. The tickets will be sold out in five minutes’ time.’ I was so furious that I just stood there defiantly, even when the ticket office had closed and everyone else had gone away. I would so much have liked to make myself popular by going back to Schierker Strasse with those tickets.

Suddenly a distinguished-looking old gentleman came over to me, and said, ‘I have two tickets available.’ I stared at him as if he had fallen from heaven.

‘In this cold,’ he explained, ‘I didn’t set out just to get back the small sum these tickets cost. I knew how many people would like to see the film.’ His wife, he said, wasn’t feeling well, and so she had given up the idea of going to the cinema. I showed my delight so obviously that he asked, ‘Does your eternal bliss depend upon it?’

‘Yes!’ I replied, in all seriousness.

‘Then in those circumstances, allow me to make you a present of our two tickets,’ he said. ‘And you ought to have a hot drink at once to revive your spirits.’ We shook hands as we parted.

I decided, then and there, that if I survived and was still a decent human being, I would try all my life to listen to people and see whether they needed me. For it sometimes takes only a few words, a small gesture at the right moment, to help someone in need to recover.

I got home late, but in triumph, with the cinema tickets, and of course I didn’t refuse to take the money for them. Eva Deutschkron looked at me and said, ‘My God, Hanni is frozen blue! Gerda, may I?’ Frau Janicke understood her at once and nodded. Then Eva went into the kitchen, cut me a thick slice of bread, spread it with plenty of butter, and poured me some hot ersatz coffee. And my spirits gradually did revive. It was a wonderful moment of solidarity and companionship between us three women.

To the last, the Hellers were a deeply contradictory pair. When Irmgard Heller threw her head slightly back, so that you saw her beautiful profile beneath the old German hairstyle, I had the feeling that she regarded those Jewish women in the waiting room who wore the star with traditional anti-Semitic prejudice. It was all the more to her credit that she devoted the last of her strength to saving Jews from the greatest criminals in human history.

I sometimes talked politics with her husband, the ardent left-winger. Once I said the war would have to be lost to liberate Germany and mankind from Hitler’s regime. ‘But you can’t envisage the defeat of our Wehrm—’ he began to protest impulsively, and then clapped his hand to his mouth to keep the rest of the word Wehrmacht in. I was horrified. I had never met an opponent of the Nazis – from Ida Kahnke the toilet cleaner to Emil Koch the fireman – who hadn’t been convinced that the Allies must win the war. I didn’t start arguing with Heller, because he himself had noticed what he’d said. But the attitude he had betrayed went with the duelling scars on his face.

We quarrelled again and again. Once, Frau Heller, who had heart trouble, was lying on the sofa in their dining room. A box of sweets stood on the table. My mouth was watering. It was a long time since such good things had been available on the open market.

Benno Heller noticed my glance. ‘We share the sweets,’ he said, smiling. ‘First she eats half of them, then we divide what’s left between us, then we divide what’s left next time between us and so on – until she’s eaten them all by herself.’

‘I hope to lead a perfectly normal life some time in the future,’ I replied, ‘and then I’ll invite you both to coffee. And we’ll nibble some sweets too.’ That last sentence had just slipped out of me. Such a remark was of course idiotic, and tactless to Frau Heller, ill as she was.

That did not escape Heller. He raised his hand at once and slapped my face. It was not a hard slap, and it did more damage to my mind than to my face. I took it as a deep humiliation.

I went out without another word. The doctor ran after me. ‘Mariechen, I didn’t mean it like that!’ he cried. I was halfway down the stairs, and turned back. He was overwrought and didn’t mean to hurt my feelings, he said. I accepted his apology. We didn’t have much time to make up the quarrel.

A little later we had our last and worst argument. We talked angrily. I felt that he was obsessed by the idea of saving as many Jews as possible. There were half a dozen of them sheltering illegally in his apartment during the day, trying to look as if they had some good reason to be there: wiping down the window frames or cleaning vegetables. And Heller was always urging his Aryan former patients to take someone in. I feared that sooner or later it would end in disaster.

‘What’s going to happen when someone who’s gone underground is staying with people who’ve changed their minds and give him up to the Gestapo?’ I asked. Such cases had been known. Many of the Jewish women whom he helped to escape had not been prepared for a life underground. ‘You’re simply pushing those women in at the deep end. But many of them can’t swim, and certainly not under water,’ I warned the gynaecologist reproachfully. He had no idea what I was talking about, and got angrier and angrier. Then he exploded. ‘I’ve seen through you, and I don’t think much of your character! You don’t want me to help anyone but you! If I find a dozen refuges, you want them all for yourself, a week here, a week there. That’s how you aim to survive until the end of the war. But it’s not all about you. We have to save as many people as possible!’

To me, that was the end. ‘You’re insulting my honour,’ I said, ‘and this is the end of our relationship.’ I walked out without saying goodbye. Once again he followed me to the stairwell and called, mockingly, ‘You’ll be back on the day we next agreed to meet, won’t you? You’ll come, oh yes, you’ll come!’ I turned, and cried with all the pride of which I was capable, ‘No, I won’t! Never again!’ And then I was gone.

I didn’t have the courage to go back to Frau Janicke and describe this terrible scene to her. I wandered aimlessly further and further out of the city. It was very cold; my feet were frozen stiff. To warm them up I stamped hard on the ground at every step I took. In my sense of desolation and misery, I wished heartily that I could meet the only friend and ally of many long years still left to me: Hanni Koch. ‘Want to meet Koch, want to meet Koch,’ I muttered to myself, stamping my feet, but I knew that she couldn’t possibly be in this part of the city. She was probably sitting on her stool in the office of the Köpenick laundry.

And then, suddenly, a familiar figure did come towards me. She was a delicately built woman, and I knew very well that she wasn’t Frau Koch, however much I wished for that. She was wrapped in a wonderful green stole of the finest wool, an expensive garment such as Hannchen Koch had never possessed. This person came closer, stopped right in front of me and said, ‘My word, you do look cross!’ It was Lieschen Sabbarth.

The three-wigs girl, whom I had met by chance that day in a street in Neukölln, was also in a temper. Lieschen had just been to see a colleague who claimed to have sprained her ankle badly. Because of that injury, the whole troupe of acrobats were obliged to cancel a show for a Wehrmacht audience, which would have been very well paid. With typical solidarity, however, Lieschen had gone all the way from the extreme north of Berlin to the south to visit her colleague. But she had found only the supposed invalid’s mother at home. ‘What, sprained her ankle?’ asked the mother. ‘I don’t know about that. She’s met this officer, he’s in Berlin for three days and treating her to all sorts of good things.’

At this news, Lieschen Sabbarth had turned round in a fury to go home again. On the way, we had met. We went a few steps together, and then she invited me into a café, ordered ersatz coffee for both of us and bought me a piece of yeast cake. We sat there for a long time, enjoying our conversation.

‘I’m going to tell you something that no one else knows,’ she said at one point. ‘Give me your word of honour not to breathe a word about it.’ The secret was that she, who had been trained by Camilla Fiochi and was friends with her to this day, had an illegitimate child by Paolo Fiochi. It had happened five or six years ago, when they were all living under the same roof in Zeuthen. At the time Paolo Fiochi was already in a relationship with his great love the Italian dancer. But he and Lieschen were young and bored, and so they had started an affair. I was shocked. At that time I couldn’t understand how such a thing was possible.

When we parted, Lieschen Sabbarth gave me two packages that had really been meant for her colleague. ‘Here, I don’t want to keep these. You have them,’ she said. One was a prettily wrapped fifty-gram chocolate bar, the other a packet of twenty cigarettes tied up with a coloured ribbon bow. Fortified by these presents, I went back to Schierker Strasse.

It was evening by now. Gerda Janicke and Eva Deutschkron were waiting for me, and they were overwrought. Not primarily for my sake, of course, but if anything had happened to me they would be in danger too. To mollify them, I took the two packages out of my bag, and said, ‘I had a very special experience today. And I brought this back for little Jörg.’ I meant the chocolate. Two minutes later I was calling myself an idiot, as Frau Fiochi herself so often had. I had given away expensive luxuries that I would have enjoyed myself, and there hadn’t really been any point in it. Frau Janicke hardly even said thank you, but carelessly threw the packages into a drawer.

And then an idea jumped at me, like a dog barking in my ear and telling me what to say to the two women: I delivered a long lecture extempore. I took my aunt Grete as my subject, and it was brilliant. I told them her entire life story, described her appearance and her character – and I didn’t say she was my aunt, I claimed she was a former Aryan neighbour of mine whom I had met in the street. She had insisted on giving me a couple of presents for my hostess and her dear little boy, I said, but she had to go and buy them first, and I was kept waiting for a long time.