The Last Jews in Berlin (11 page)

But the quota of Germans allowed entrance into the United States each year was 27,000, and several times this number of Germans, most of them Jews, had applied for visas before them.

And then came
Kristallnacht
, the night of the broken glass, November 9–10, 1938.

In Paris, two days earlier, a young German Jewish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan had entered the German Embassy intending to assassinate the ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck. Grynszpan's parents, Polish Jews who had lived in Hannover nearly twenty-five years, had recently been expelled from Germany along with some 50,000 Jews who had originally come from Poland. Anguished by this event as well as by the persecutions against the Jews in general, Grynszpan had shot and mortally wounded Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary of the embassy, who had come out to determine his business. Ironically, Vom Rath's own sentiments had been sufficiently anti-Nazi to prompt his surveillance by the Gestapo. When Vom Rath died of his wounds two days later, it was an excuse for the National Socialists to go on a rampage. No spontaneous riot, it was carefully orchestrated, with Hitler's blessings, by Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, who, as Heinrich Himmler's second in command in the S.S., ran the Gestapo and the Security Service.

The rampage laid waste to at least 7,500 shops throughout Germany. Preliminary figures from Heydrich in a confidential report to Hermann Goering on November 11 indicated that 119 synagogues had been set on fire and another 76 completely destroyed. The human toll was far worse. The number of Jews murdered that night was never accurately established, but one hundred would be conservative. Hundreds of Jews were injured and many women were raped—to the consternation of party purists, who abhorred any mingling of Jew and Gentile. Twenty thousand Jews were arrested, many of them, not coincidentally, well-to-do; it had been the intention from the outset to incarcerate Jews who could be ransomed later for a high price.

As the marauders set the torch to Jewish property throughout Germany and crashed their clubs against store-front windows, the Jews themselves, lacking specific information, could only surmise that some form of retribution was being exacted for the death of Vom Rath. Anna had already sold her shop for a pittance to a member of the Nazi party, so it was spared when the buyer intervened. But later that night the marauders reached the Bavarian Quarter. When the doorbell to their apartment rang, Ruth instinctively responded. But before she had reached the door she felt herself seized from behind and pushed roughly away. A hand went over her mouth, muffling her startled cry. It was Frieda, their housekeeper, a young woman just a few years older than Ruth—Frieda, her friend, who had worked for them for ten years, Frieda who, on her days and evenings off, had enough contact with young pro-Nazis to know how readily they could be incited to acts against the Jews. Frieda motioned to Ruth to be quiet. The two women lay on the floor until whoever was at the door went away and there was no more sound of crashing glass.

The next year brought another calamity. Ruth had grown up with a cousin named Werner, the son of Aunt Paula, her mother's sister. Werner was five years older than Ruth and, like her, an only child. He lived close by. Ruth and Werner spent so much time together that they felt like brother and sister. They were kindred spirits too. Werner refused to be demolished by the Nazis' constraints. He adjusted his life to reality. He was a pianist. In other times he might have become a concert pianist; now he contented himself with playing cocktail music in bars. He was gifted and, until circumstances became too difficult, in great demand. After the Nazis came to power he frequently accepted bookings in foreign countries, where he would be free to play the American jazz the Nazis so abominated because of its Negro idioms. He especially liked to work on the Riviera, where single women were abundant. Werner was a lady's man who had left the proverbial trail of broken hearts. It was this propensity that eventually undid him. One day, en route with his mother to a relative's birthday party in Berlin, Werner chanced upon an old girl friend, a Gentile woman, who had not taken their parting lightly. To their horror the young woman walked up to a policeman and denounced Werner—who was having an affair with another Christian woman—for violation of the Nuremberg Laws. He was arrested, tried and sentenced to several years in prison.

Not even Ruth could come to terms with the reality of Werner's fate. For weeks she anguished over the prospect that Werner might be beaten to death by prison guards, as the Gestapo had beaten another cousin.

And then, just as she felt herself slipping for the first time in her life into an abyss of depression, Ruth met Kurt Thomas, and promptly fell in love.

Thomas, a radiologist, was in his late fifties, more than thirty years Ruth's senior, yet young in his appearance and ways. They had been introduced by his stepdaughter, who was a customer of Ruth's. Kurt's age was simply not a problem for Ruth. In fact, had she been an “Aryan,” her affair would have been very much à la mode; given the absence of young men called up to military service, liaisons with older men were so common by now among German women that the subject had already been treated in contemporary literature.

Kurt agreed at once to emigrate and made his own visa application. But the realities were against them, for the waiting list for visas to the United States contained the names of about 200,000 persons, almost all of them Jews. In 1939, for the first time, the American consulate would issue the full quota of visas, 27,370. But only 5,524 German-born persons would actually enter the United States—one-fifth as many as had qualified to go—because of obstructions imposed by the Nazis. It would be even worse in 1940, when only 3,556 German-born persons would be admitted to the United States, despite the fact that 27,355 visas had been issued.

As they waited, Ruth, Anna and Kurt depended on Ruth's dress-designing skills, which they recognized as their ticket to salvation. Their everyday experiences reinforced their feelings that, in spite of the worsening conditions, they themselves were safe.

The most distressing event of 1941 for Ruth did not directly affect her. A few months after the United States entered the war, her cousin Werner, still in jail for having violated the Nuremberg Laws, learned that he would be among the first Jews to be “resettled in the East,” as the Nazis put it. Despite the uncertainty, Werner found the prospect appealing. It would get him out of jail, for one thing. And it would at last distance him from the madness that Berlin had come to represent. How hard could the life in Poland be, compared to his present reality? A final consideration was the prospect of heavy bombings by the Allies; that day might be a long way off, but Werner was certain it was inevitable. In leaving Berlin for Poland, he would at least be eliminating the bombings as a possible cause of death. Werner wrote to his mother suggesting that she volunteer to come along, so that they could be resettled together. Aunt Paula took Werner's advice. Other family members could do nothing to dissuade her. The Gestapo gladly obliged.

Kurt and Ruth had postponed marriage pending resolution of their emigrant status. Now, despairing of their chances of getting to the United States, determined to grab what happiness they could, they were married. Then, suddenly, the American consulate, which had stopped issuing visas when the quota was filled, began to issue them again after the new year. Once Anna had bought their passages, they packed their trunks and suitcases and sent most of them off to American Express. The American consulate summoned them to complete the formalities for immigration. But exit visas from the German government never materialized, and soon the German government suspended all but special emigration visas.

And so they had lived, their situation constantly deteriorating, their friends and relatives disappearing, until the night in November 1942 when Ruth received the Gestapo summons.

In the weeks following their flight into illegality Kurt came often to the Barsches', where Ruth was living with Hilde Hohn, the S.S. officer's wife, and Ruth would visit him at the Kaiserallee apartment of Lea, Kurt's former wife. When Lea was in Munich visiting her daughter, Ruth would stay overnight. Soon she began to spend some nights with Kurt even when Lea was there. Ruth was not worried about Kurt's proximity to Lea; she was a woman past sixty, and Ruth was twenty-six.

Lea lived in an old Berlin apartment that had three large rooms in the front. A long hallway led from these rooms to the kitchen; several bedrooms were off the hallway. At the end of the hallway was a back door. This was to be Kurt's escape route if anyone came for him. The door that separated the front rooms from the hallway was always to remain closed.

On February 19, 1943, Ruth had two appointments. First she was to meet Hilde late that afternoon at the railway station to help her with the packages of food Hilde was bringing from her in-laws' estate in the country. Then Ruth was to meet her husband, bringing him some of the food. But Hilde's train was late. Ruth called Kurt to tell him and said that she would call again after she had deposited Hilde and the packages at the Barsches' apartment.

A short while later there was a knock on the door of the Kaiserallee apartment. Lea answered. It was the Gestapo, come to investigate a report that a Jew was living with her. In a loud, angry voice she denied the charge—just as Kurt came rushing in to investigate the commotion. He knocked one of them down, but then they subdued him and led him off.

When Ruth called from Hilde's to say she was on her way she was told what had happened. Frantic, she begged Lea to offer money to the Gestapo in exchange for Kurt's passage to Switzerland. But Lea, who herself had been spared by the Gestapo only because Kurt had once been her husband, was afraid to risk herself further, and her son by a previous marriage prevailed on her not to try.

So Kurt was gone, and Ruth could only wonder when, if ever, she would see him again.

10

T
HE HOUSE
in Wittenau owned by Robert Jerneitzig, the greengrocer, was solidly built, with two rooms and a kitchen on the ground floor, plus a bathroom which was entered from the outside—and a closed-in terrace. Upstairs were two bedrooms, one large, one small, with a connecting door. Above the bedrooms was an attic. Finally, there was the basement, which had been fitted out as a bomb shelter by Jerneitzig's tenants, Joseph and Kadi Wirkus, to be used in the event that they did not have time to get to the community shelter a few blocks away.

Kurt and Hella Riede, the young Jewish couple Jerneitzig had brought to Wittenau on the morning after the massive February 27 roundup of Jews in Berlin, moved into the smaller of the two upstairs bedrooms. To enter and leave their own bedroom the Wirkuses had to pass through the one occupied by the Riedes. Within a few days what at first had seemed awkward became completely natural. The Wirkuses simply didn't mind the inconvenience and even found it amusing. For their part, the Riedes were quickly convinced that they had stumbled into heaven.

They could not imagine more generous hosts. From the first the Wirkuses shared their ration cards with the Riedes without asking for recompense. The Riedes, who had managed to guard several thousand marks they had been given by their parents, contributed whatever the Wirkuses would accept. There was no problem with food. Kadi could get whatever she needed from her parents' farm in Pomerania to supplement the food they got with their ration cards.

There was a coziness to the house, due in part to the small scale of the rooms but much more to the outgoing nature of the Wirkuses. In the evenings especially, when Beppo—as Joseph Wirkus was known—was home from work, the air was filled with conversation as the couples made their first tentative appraisals of one another. The chemistry between them remained as remarkable in their first week together as it had in their first moments. The special and dangerous circumstances in which they found themselves seemed to augment and compress their responses, so that they quickly progressed to the kind of feelings that in normal times might have taken them months to approach. The men, who looked so much alike, actually began to act like brothers. Kadi, so quick to respond to people she liked, took to Hella as a sister. There were no arguments; although Kurt was still on edge from his abrupt flight, he was an easygoing man at heart and tried hard to be agreeable. Hella was even more accommodating; she was a quiet person, comfortable to be with. When Kadi went shopping Hella minded the baby, Wilfried. It quickly began to seem to Kadi that she was leaving Wilfried with his aunt. For her part, Hella felt like the child's second mother.

But what the Riedes received from the Wirkuses was far more important than food and shelter and the confirmation of friendship. It was the knowledge that there were German Gentiles who cared for them to the point of risking their lives.

A week after the Riedes moved in, Beppo conceived an audacious plan to obtain a fake identification card for Kurt. The plan hung on the uncanny resemblance between them. They had the same coloring and facial contours, and both of them wore heavy glasses. The plan was to obtain a postal identification card using Beppo's name and address and Kurt's photograph. As I.D. cards went, a postal card wasn't much; it was issued by the post office as a means of identifying recipients of money orders and registered mail. But to a Jew with no papers whatever save those that marked him as a Jew, a postal I.D. card might one day be a passport to life.

Beppo was well known at the post office because he supervised all correspondence in his division. He also had a fair idea of who at the post office would work according to the book and who would be more casual. He chose his mark with care, a quiet-mannered clerk in his fifties with whom he had had frequent dealings.

As accustomed as he was to doing business with the clerk, however, Beppo could not quiet his nerves as he approached him on February 12. His hands were damp and shaking ever so slightly, and his armpits felt wet. “I've lost my postal I.D.,” he said in a voice he fought to control.