Underground in Berlin (34 page)

‘I have plenty of food rations, that’s no problem,’ she said. ‘My mother hardly eats anything now. I can offer you bread coupons.’ Then she told me her address, in a road off Stralauer Allee, and said that as a former dentist’s receptionist she set great store by hygiene, adding, with a pause for effect, that she came from Tempelhof. I didn’t know at once how I was supposed to react to this information, but then I made her a little bow, which turned out to be just the right thing: Tempelhof was a good residential area.

From then on I went to visit Frau Rose about every ten days. We exchanged coupons, and talked for a little while. I heard all about her mother’s state of health on every occasion, and fortunately seldom had to say much myself. It was rather surprising, then, that one day, as she went to the door with me, she said, ‘You know, I don’t think our acquaintanceship can be called that any more; I’d say it’s a friendship.’

We had so much bread available now that when Gerrit and I went to see the Neukes as usual every Saturday, we could take half a loaf with us as a present to our hosts. Finally, the Dutchman told me, ‘You can cancel the order for bread.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Tell your friend she doesn’t need to give you bread any more. We have plenty.’

That remark showed that Burgers realised what a strain my relationship with Frau Koch had become. I wouldn’t have credited him with such perspicacity.

It was extraordinarily interesting to listen to conversations in those long queues, where I learned a great deal about the political mood of the times. Once a discussion programme about Jews came yakking over the radio in a ground-floor apartment. A woman in the queue said, in quite a loud voice, ‘As if we hadn’t heard enough about that by now! They repeat it year after year. Goebbels said the Jews have all gone, so why don’t they tell us when we’ll be able to get smoked fish again and when the bombing will stop?’ Everyone agreed with her.

On another occasion I heard two women talking about the Rosenstrasse demonstration of February 1943 by Aryans with Jews in their families, mainly women whose Jewish husbands and other relations had been interned in the Rosenstrasse community centre. That was over a year ago now. One woman said to another, ‘Your cousin was there, wasn’t she? Did you go too? What was it like?’

‘Yes, I was there, and we called out, “Let our husbands go free!” They weren’t going to shoot German women down there in the city centre, and finally they did let the men out.’

‘Oh, I’m glad to hear that. If I’d known in time I’d have gone along too.’

‘A lot of people did, just to show solidarity,’ said her acquaintance.

But most of the women waiting in those long queues were complaining, for instance about the tiny amount of the fat ration, and the fact that everything else they really wanted to eat – especially fruit and vegetables – had disappeared from the shops. Even fully Aryan people in employment were undernourished. Well, I thought to myself, if you wanted to live normal lives, you shouldn’t have elected Hitler and conjured up a war.

Once I spent four hours queuing in the freezing cold for horsemeat, which was a delicacy in wartime. The meat didn’t come from tired old nags but from good horses that had died as the result of enemy action, and were now being sold for meat.

My legs already felt like lumps of ice, when a girl who had arrived long before me came out of the horse butcher’s with her shopping and walked past the queue. Suddenly she stopped in front of me. She had recognised me, and I too now remembered seeing her from time to time in the synagogue yard. ‘Hey, I know you! In the same boat, aren’t we?’ she said pertly. I unobtrusively nodded.

‘So you’re from a kosher household,’ she went on, keeping her voice very low now, ‘but all the same you’re buying meat from the horse butcher?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided that if you look at horsemeat in the right frame of mind it’s strictly kosher.
*
And at this moment I’m the supreme rabbinical authority.’ Then I had to laugh.

I was in luck that day. So much meat had been delivered that four times the normal amount of the meat ration on your card had been allotted. Instead of 500 grams of meat you got two kilos, and also marrowbones that made wonderful broth. Because the sale of the horsemeat had been announced in advance, I had three meat ration cards with me, from Frau Koch, from Burgers and from Frau Blase. They were all pleased and grateful, and praised me to the skies.

That wasn’t the first time I had met people who, like me, had gone underground. When I saw someone in the street whom I knew from the old days, we usually made swift eye contact agreeing not to show it. Later I counted these meetings, and in all I had met twenty-two other people in the same situation as me.

The most important of them was Fritz Goldberg. He was the son of our former landlord’s family in Landsberger Strasse, and was already over thirty. When we were lodging at his parents’ house I didn’t have much to do with him. However, when I ran into him at the Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn station, it was as if I were meeting a fellow countryman in the desert. From that moment on we were friends.

He was living with his fiancée Ruth Lachotzke in the back room of a dairy. At the time I had the impression that all Jews living illegally in Berlin were lodging in dairies. Fritz Goldberg was in touch with various small groups of those who had gone underground, and he told me where they met. At our very first meeting he asked me if I wouldn’t like to belong to one of the fabulous barter exchanges.

‘I don’t have anything to barter or anything to sell,’ I said, ‘and I’d rather not be in touch with those circles. I’d be breaking all the rules of conspiracy.’

Fritz was aware of the danger. He knew the names of several Jewish informers such as Stella Goldschlag, called ‘the blonde ghost’, and Rolf Isaaksohn. He also told me about Ruth Danziger, daughter of the managers of Danziger’s Diner. It was from him that I first heard the expression
Greifer
, literally ‘gripper’, for a police detective.

These informers frequented places where they could meet Jews who had gone to ground. Those who still had money might spend their evenings in such places as the State Opera House, and not a few of them were turned in at the end of the performance by informers waiting for them outside the entrance.

‘Are you living near here?’ Fritz Goldberg asked with interest.

‘Yes, not far away,’ I said.

‘Where exactly?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

I wasn’t going to tell him. When we parted, I acted as if I were going the wrong way on purpose. I ostentatiously made for the building where in fact I really was living, but I gave him a conspiratorial grin; I wanted him to think that I was deceiving him and that was certainly not where I lived.

After that we crossed each other’s path by chance now and then at the same U-Bahn station. If we had time we went for a walk in Treptower Park and sat on a bench there. As everyone was supposed to work, we had to be careful not to arouse suspicion. If someone passed we pretended to be lovers, leaned close together and smiled at each other. An old lady might give us a friendly nod.

Once, by chance, I went into the shop at the back of which he was living. As I was handing a new ration card over the counter to have it registered, the salesgirl pinched my hand. Only now did I recognise his fiancée, Ruth Lachotzke. I quickly withdrew the card, because I didn’t want her to see the address, or the names Blase and Burgers. ‘I just looked in to say hello,’ I said, and left.

I knew that the relationship between the two of them was very difficult. Fritz clung to the girl because she gave him a sense of security. She was a blue-eyed blonde, as non-Jewish as you can imagine. But the two of them used to quarrel all night. Their mutual anger and hatred were enough to outweigh caution, and they stopped thinking about the neighbours. He said she was so demanding that she sent him crazy, always wanting him to get hold of butter somewhere instead of margarine.

As a forced labourer, Fritz had worked with the refuse collectors, and had a colleague among them who could indeed get hold of butter. But when he turned up at the refuse tip, the man warned him off. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re the one with the star. Better not come back here, there are Nazis around.’ It was sheer madness that he did show his face there again, several times. Finally someone recognised the Jew who didn’t wear a Jewish star in the yard, the Gestapo were called in, and that was the end of him.

Fritz Goldberg had literally sought his own death. I heard about it from Ruth Lachotzke. A few days after his arrest, I met her in the street during the midday break. ‘They nabbed Fritz,’ she told me. ‘It’s all very sad, but as far as I’m concerned they can torture him as long as they like.’ Seeing the horror in my face, she went on, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Of course I cried my eyes out. All I mean is that he would never say that he was living with me, or where to find me.’

The loss of Fritz Goldberg as someone to talk to was very sad for me. He had given me important information, and I had been able to exchange ideas with him, as the only person I knew from my former world, about my situation and my fears and concerns.

Now I could only hold fast to the Jewish tradition. I don’t know what will become of the Jews in the USA or Palestine, I said to myself, but I’m here, I’m a
minyan
*
in myself, I am all Israel and I’ll do my duty. After that, I gave the park bench where Fritz and I often used to sit the name of Weissensee,
^†
and for a long time I went there regularly to say the Kaddish. I wanted Fritz Goldberg to have a proper Jewish memorial.

Gerrit Burgers meant nothing to me really, yet he was gradually becoming a familiar figure in my life. If he wasn’t in the middle of one of his fits of rage, he could be very pleasant, attentive and considerate.

We always had plenty to talk about. When he came home from work he told me what he had been doing, and on a day when there had been an air-raid warning we exchanged accounts of how and where we had spent the time.

Every day I bought the
Berliner Süden
newspaper, and Burgers brought the weekly
Das Reich
home. He took a great interest in politics, and had become something of an armchair strategist about the way the war was going. We had cut maps out of the newspapers. Gerrit marked out the fronts with pins, and we put our own interpretation on every new development. We read
Das Reich
aloud to each other and discussed what it said. He was well informed about geography, and could assess any piece of information at once. In addition he liked solving crossword puzzles, and was good at them; he could identify all the tributaries of any obscure African river, and all the operetta characters whose names consisted of four, five or eight letters. He had never heard the operettas themselves.

When the all clear sounded after an air-raid warning, Gerrit and I often went out into the streets. My thoughts were so graphic that I had to be careful not to say them out loud. So I developed my own ritual for the situation: while we saw the red firelight on the horizon, I sang in my head, to the tune of the Horst Wessel song, ‘Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête’ [‘He Who Sows the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind’], a line that I had liked very much in my schooldays.

To me, these raids meant not defeat but victory. I’d have liked to tell the bombers, ‘Keep going. This war could have been avoided, so let anyone who voted for Hitler feel the consequences.’

Now and then we also went to the cinema at the weekend, not of course to the palatial picture-houses of the west of Berlin, showing premières of films, but to the fleapits of Neukölln or the Görlitzer Bahnhof. When, towards the end of the war, Marika Rökk sang the sentimental song ‘Im Leben geht alles vorüber’ [‘Everything Passes Over’], I thought: now they’re really in a stew!

At that time, anyone who wanted could hear the language of slaves and the special kind of humour developed by people living under a dictatorship. I realised that one day when I was walking down Adalbertstrasse in Kreuzberg. I liked that street, with its enormous number of back yards; to me, it was the quintessence of a proletarian residential area.

On a blazing hot August day in 1944, I saw a few passers by gathering outside a small bakery there and laughing. I approached with caution, something always to be recommended on such occasions. A cake with the wording
Happy New Year
carefully piped on it in icing had been placed in the display window on this sweltering day in high summer. A cardboard notice beside it explained that this was the sample work produced by an apprentice hoping to qualify as a journeyman baker, and another notice explained tersely: ‘Dummy’.

In the circumstances of the time, this amounted to a political statement – and an anti-war statement at that: no one could make a genuine cake topped with genuine icing sugar for want of the ingredients. It was, as expressly stated, a dummy or mock-up of a cake, and the comment suggested ‘Happy New Year – in this heat?’

‘Ooh, that’s a good one, that is,’ said an old lady. ‘That’s a real laugh.’

A few days later, I saw a crowd forming outside the same bakery again. A uniformed police officer broke it up and then went away. I stayed at a safe distance, and only afterwards did I go up to the shop and asked a woman coming out of it, ‘What’s been going on here?’

‘The police wanted that cake and the two notices taken out of the window.’

‘What’s it to do with the police?’

‘They said there were reasons, but they weren’t allowed to discuss them because they could be misunderstood.’

Also in Adalbertstrasse, I saw another incident that made an even more lasting impression on me. A very long line of soldiers, like an army-worm, was winding its way along the street, singing. The repertory of its songs was always the same, and as so often the folksong ‘Dark Brown Is the Hazel Nut’ rang out. When I walked along beside a column on the march like that, I took great care not to keep time with the marching men, but it was difficult not to; the rhythm practically forced itself on you.