The Last Jews in Berlin (10 page)

That night the air raids were especially heavy. Marushka was sick to her stomach. She would slip into sleep as though she was being carried off in the ebb of a wave, then crash into wakefulness with the next burst of a bomb or fit of nausea.

In the morning an old nun with a kindly face came to her bed and took her hand but said nothing.

“Why aren't you speaking of the child? What's the matter?” Marushka said.

“He's dead,” the old nun said. A bomb had destroyed the generators that supplied electricity to the quarter. The incubators had shut down. All of the incubator babies had died.

For a moment Marushka closed her eyes. She wanted to cry, but she couldn't. Then she looked at the nun. “I'd like to ask you a favor. If you can't do it, just say so. Would it be possible for the child's real father to see him?”

“I'll have it arranged.”

At two in the morning on September 9 Hans walked softly into a small chapel on the ground floor of the hospital. He sat for half an hour at the side of the coffin as shadows from the candles played across his son's face, imparting, eerily, the quality of life. Somewhere the nuns had found masses of flowers, and their scent filled the room. Toward three o'clock the night guard took him to Marushka's room. “I've got a visitor here,” he whispered. “Just ring the bell when he wants to leave.”

Hans took Marushka's.hand and held it without speaking. His face was dark with grief. Finally he said to Marushka, “The only thing I'm grateful for is that mother doesn't know—and won't.” He could scarcely speak the last words.

Marushka held him. “Better times will come,” she promised. “Better times will come.”

9

S
AVED BY
an S.S. officer's wife! Over and over again Ruth Thomas pondered that unimaginable irony in those first tentative days after her fate had passed into the hands of Hilde Hohn. Hilde, trim and young and pretty like Ruth herself, had taken her in on a whim and against her better judgment because she recognized in Ruth, and responded to, some aspect of herself. Was it that each of them was determined to fix a happy face on life despite the wretched time in which they lived? For the moment Ruth couldn't know, because the relationship was too fragile to be tested, and the consequences of a strain in that relationship—be it from a poorly received question or a premature attempt to be familiar—were too horrible to even contemplate. More than that: Ruth's energies were preempted by concern for her mother and Kurt. Especially Kurt. She had waited too long for marriage, and it was still too new for her not to miss his presence.

Kurt had come to her at the end of a series of events that would have broken any woman without her extraordinary mechanism for dealing with adversity. Everything that had happened to Ruth had to be measured against the riches with which she had begun life. It was not so much a matter of money—her mother was comfortably off, but not wealthy—as it was the circumstances in which she grew up and the talent she brought to life. She was a child of the twenties, a time when open, malicious anti-Semitism pervaded German society. And yet such swirls of malice scarcely touched her. Ruth grew up in the midst of a culturally abundant environment that was as German as it was Jewish, embodying a devotion to high values—a life of concerts and plays and operas and lectures that generated a constant barrage of ideas in a vibrant and free-thinking city. To be part of that society—as the most successful Jews considered themselves—was to experience a life as good as life could be. For these Jews it was an affluent life as well, in splendid neighborhoods of stately homes on large wooded lots, some of the homes nestled next to shimmering lakes, with a cozy inn here and there where one took a gigantic Sunday meal. There were poor Jews in Berlin in the late twenties—one in four was receiving charity—but Jews were well represented in remunerative areas of business, and if they had not yet made it to the most desirable neighborhoods near the Grunewald, Berlin's giant park on the southwest side of the city, there were those Jews who
had
made it to inspire them.

Ruth was reared in a large family of uncles, aunts and cousins. Going to the synagogue was a family affair. She loved it. She thought of herself as a Jewish girl for whom religion was not just a matter of faith but an expression of character.

Ruth's mother, Anna Rosenthal, made certain Ruth received the best education private schools could provide. Ruth had the mind for it. She was interested in music, archaeology and architecture, and would have happily studied in any of those fields, but by the time she was ready, higher study had been proscribed for Jews. It was 1933; Ruth was nineteen. The only way she could have continued her education was to go abroad, but she didn't want to leave her mother. Besides, her mother needed her help.

Anna Rosenthal owned a designer dress shop in the best shopping district of Berlin, a few blocks from the Unter den Linden. Her manager took Ruth under her wing and taught her the business. Ruth had a flair for adapting the designs of European couturiers, and the store was soon selling her creations. If she was underemployed—if she had regrets about her lost opportunities in a more suitable field—she never revealed it. Rather, what she showed to others was her keenness, her warmth and her zest for life. She loved a good story, she loved the deep well of culture that was her heritage on both the Jewish and German sides. She was aroused by her surroundings and experiences. And she was ambitious to grow as far as possible, to be involved artistically and culturally.

And then it all began to change.

The first change involved Ruth's relationship with Aunt Martha, who was not really a blood relative but a close Gentile friend—dear Aunt Martha, who loved to eat and drink and kept getting bigger and bigger until a tape measure would scarcely reach around her. She lived with her husband and three children in Mecklenburg, a two-hour drive from Berlin. They ran an inn, which was the social center of a rich agricultural province. There the locals ate and drank beer. The restaurant had private dining rooms and a garden that overflowed with blooms and fragrance in the summer. In addition to her thriving restaurant Aunt Martha owned a great deal of land. She was a very wealthy woman and a generous one. Whenever a get-together was arranged, she would have her cook prepare abundant quantities of the most delicious food, almost all of it richer by far than anything her guests were used to in Berlin.

Ruth's mother liked nothing more than long weekends in the country, so the family would travel to Mecklenburg every holiday and almost every weekend. They would leave after lunch on Saturday and arrive in time for afternoon cakes and coffee. Ruth loved to go as much as Mother. Aunt Martha's three children—Heinz, Käthe and Ilza—were older than she was, but they treated her like a beloved younger sister. Heinz, in particular, always had presents for her and told her wonderful stories. And there was a castle to play in nearby that had belonged to Aunt Martha's grandmother.

One Saturday when they arrived they noticed a new picture on the living room wall. It was a picture of a man with a small trim mustache who wore a brown shirt and a Sam Brown belt. “Who's that?” Mother asked.

“That's our Hitler,” Aunt Martha said.

“And who is Hitler?”

“He's going to make Germany great.”

As the years passed and Hitler's power grew, the anti-Semitic utterances that might once have been dismissed as a lunatic's ravings had to be regarded more and more seriously. Yet Aunt Martha scoffed at the idea that Hitler meant to harm the Jews. “Just politics,” she said.

And then came Saturday, April 1, 1933, and the boycott of all Jewish enterprises in Germany. Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor two months earlier by Paul von Hindenburg, President of the German Republic, on the supposition that only he and his National Socialists—by then the largest party in the country, with one-third the popular vote—could deal with the paralysis that had immobilized the government for months. Hitler took power legally; there followed immediately a series of illegal acts designed to consolidate his power and intimidate the opposition. A fire set in the Reichstag, blamed on a Dutch pyromaniac, who may have been used by the National Socialists, gave Hitler his excuse to begin a pseudolegal process of abolishing all constitutional guarantees of individual freedom. The party's infamous storm troopers assaulted the political opposition, trade union leaders and Jews. Sheer terror purged the Reichstag of so many opposition deputies that Hitler had no trouble in pushing through the Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers. The boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, which simply institutionalized storm trooper violence against Jewish professionals and businesses, was Hitler's first formal effort against the people he believed to be at the heart of a Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy Germany.

That day the bell rang in the new, more comfortable apartment Ruth and Anna had recently moved into in the Bavarian Quarter, a neighborhood comprised mostly of Jewish families. Ruth opened the door. There stood Aunt Martha. At her side was her chauffeur, carrying a huge basket of food. Aunt Martha was confused and distraught. She and her husband had been party members since the early twenties. Their circumstances had improved even more since Hitler had come to power. But it's not easy to disavow old friendships, she told them, and she had no intention of doing so. “Hitler must not harm you,” she said.

She confessed that she hadn't expected anything like the boycott. She had feared that they were starving. She feared the future. “You are such beautiful people,” she kept saying over and over again. And then she made an astonishing proposal. Anna and Ruth should come and live with her. She was sure she could protect them.

Anna turned the offer down. When they parted she said, “We probably won't see each other again. Our roads will separate now.”

“No,” Aunt Martha protested.

“You'll see,” Mother said.

But then Ruth and Anna received letters from all three of Aunt Martha's children. They were all grown now, they were all in good positions because of their political involvement, but all of them wrote that they could not imagine a holiday without Ruth and Anna, and they begged them to come. Käthe, one of Aunt Martha's daughters, had married an important Nazi, a gauleiter, the leader of a political district. Now Käthe wrote them that nothing would happen to them. “Our ambitions are only against academic people, officials, civil servants, not the people in production.”

The letter reassured Anna somewhat. Then, too, they still had numbers of Christian friends, most of whom went out of their way to express their disapproval of Hitler's attacks against the Jews. And although Ruth and Anna were acutely conscious that physical aggression against Jews was increasing, not once were they themselves harmed.

One of the assets that helped the family through this time was Ruth's ability to perceive the comic aspects of life, however dour it became. The so-called Nuremberg Laws, passed by the Nazis at a party rally on September 15, 1935, held in the central Bavarian city that was known as the spiritual home of National Socialism, were a good example. These laws “for the protection of German blood and German honor” forbade marriages between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood” as well as “extramarital intercourse between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood.” Hard labor, fines and imprisonment awaited violators, Jews or non-Jews alike. Ruth found the laws so ludicrous she refused to take them seriously. And how could people who passed such inane decrees be taken seriously? she argued. The Nazis were so ridiculous, how could there be any danger? She couldn't see how Hitler could remain in power very long. It was just the kind of talk Mother needed to stiffen her own sagging spirits.

But it wasn't long before Ruth and her mother both had to acknowledge the threat and the danger inherent in the Nuremberg Laws, because they indirectly caused a break with Aunt Martha.

It happened unexpectedly. A young Gentile woman Anna knew was married to a Jew. The couple owned a small, well-kept hotel in Berlin. One day the woman came to ask Anna's advice. The party had demanded that she dissolve her marriage; if she didn't, she was told, she'd be forced to give up her hotel. What should she do? Anna decided to consult Aunt Martha. Several days later they met in the Bavarian Quarter apartment. Aunt Martha listened to the story. Then she said, “Divorce your husband and send him abroad.” She made it clear that the issue was not so much one of keeping a property as it was safeguarding a human life. If he was out of the country, no harm could come to him.

Aunt Martha's answer stunned Anna. It might be sensible, but it wasn't ethical. Then and there she decided that the differences between them were now too great for the relationship to continue. A few days later she wrote Aunt Martha: “A woman belongs to her husband. She should stay at his side.” She could not accept the manner in which Aunt Martha had viewed the problem.

Ruth and Anna would never return to Mecklenburg.

In 1937 Ruth met a Spanish Jew in his early thirties named Bernd Hertz. He fell in love with her and urged her to emigrate with him to the United States. Ruth cared for Bernd and thought that she might even love him, but she could not even consider the prospect of leaving her mother alone in Berlin, where life for a Jew had become too dangerous. Ruth told him that she and her mother would join him in America as soon as they could.

By now they were more than ready to emigrate; two relatives had already been sent to concentration camps. They applied for visas to the United States, and deposited money in banks in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia while on their holidays. Their sponsor in the United States was a young cousin who was teaching school. In the spring of 1938 they received their affidavits of support. Their papers were now in order; as soon as their number came up, their visa would be issued.