The Last Jews in Berlin (15 page)

The time came to say goodbye. Fritz embraced his mother. It registered on him that even in this moment she was being a predictable Jewish mother, making it easier for him by not crying. Then he turned to his father. They shook hands and then clasped each other. Fritz left the apartment sick with the knowledge that, in all probability, he would never see his parents again.

A week later he called the Jewish community headquarters. “What's with the Croners?” he asked.

“They were picked up February fifth,” a voice on the other end said.

A few days later Fritz went to the apartment of his parents' neighbor, where Willy Croner had left a trunk with their papers, the papers that proved he had owned valuable property he had been forced to sell for a pittance. Fritz remembered the details of that humiliation all too clearly. One day in February 1938 Fritz was in Berlin on business when he received a frantic phone call from his father. “Come fast,” he had said, “I'm in trouble with the Gestapo.” When Fritz returned to Deutsch-Krone his father told him that he was being pressured by the Gestapo to sell his store and house and move to Berlin. The Gestapo said it had a buyer, but it wouldn't reveal the buyer's name or tell Willy Croner the price. Each day Willy was compelled to report to Gestapo headquarters, where he was made to stand for an hour and receive a barrage of insults, along with demands that he agree to sell out.

Several days passed, with the same routine. Then the Gestapo learned that Fritz was in Deutsch-Krone and ordered him to accompany his father. Finally Willy was excused because of his war injury, and Fritz was made to bear the Gestapo's hazing.

The Gestapo men in Deutsch-Krone were mostly peasants with little education. They delighted in making Fritz feel like a fool. They would stand him in front of one wall of their fifteen-by-eighteen-foot office, to which had been pinned the Nazi newspaper
Der Stürmer
. Then they would order him to do one hundred deep-knee bends.

“It will stop the moment your father says he will sell the shop and the house,” one of them told him. “Be sure and tell your father.”

Fritz was supposed to arrive for his daily ordeal at 7:00
A.M.
One morning he overslept and arrived late without having shaved. Each morning thereafter he was compelled to announce his arrival. “I am the Jew, Croner,” he would call out at the door. “I am clean-shaven.”

The routine had continued every day for six months. Finally Fritz said to his father, “It's no use. We have to sell.” Willy agreed. It wasn't just his son's ordeal; he knew that the same pressures were being exerted against Jews all over Germany. Inevitably they would be forced to succumb.

Willy Croner had calculated that if he ever had to sell the store he could get 500,000 Deutschmarks for it. He so informed the Gestapo. To his amazement the Gestapo agreed to the price—but then withheld all but 130,000 marks of the 500,000 paid by the buyer. Willy had been bitter about that to the last. He had worked hard for what he had earned, starting as a youth on a farm, then lugging a pack of textiles on his back through the countryside, selling to the farmers and their wives.

As he read through his father's papers Fritz made a vow. After the war he would be recompensed. The papers would help him get back what the Nazis had taken from his father. In his heart Fritz knew he would never be able to decorate his father's grave; the compensation would be his living memorial to Willy Croner.

14

N
INE MONTHS
had passed since his infant son had died, and in that period Hans Hirschel, the equable intellectual, had not once left the store in Wilmersdorf that Countess Maria von Maltzan, the baby's mother, had converted into an apartment. He spent the days alone with his memories, not simply of the child's death, or even of the deportation of his beloved mother to Theresienstadt the previous spring, but of how intoxicating life had been in Berlin before the Nazis came to power. That life was over now, and he was a prisoner, if not of the Nazis directly, at least of the hell they had made.

In order to maintain his sanity Hans followed a strict routine. Each morning at 6:15 exactly he would rise, draw Marushka's bath, then awaken her. While Marushka bathed and dressed—usually in pants, because she rode a bicycle to work—Hans would prepare her breakfast as well as a bag lunch of cut-up vegetables that she would take with her to the university, where she was finishing her studies in veterinary medicine. As soon as Marushka had departed Hans would wash the dishes, sweep the floors and tidy up the house. Then he would return to bed and read a book. Sometime after eight he would rise and begin his long ritual of preparing for the day. First he would bathe. Then he would ponder over his choice of clothing: he might wear the same suit and shirt two days in a row, but he always varied his bow ties. Finally he was ready to leave for the day—but of course he would go nowhere.

He had always been a fastidious man, and the best way to deal with his imprisonment, he had decided, was to retain as much as possible of the manner and appearance of the man he had known himself to be. The one great problem was the beard he had grown to alter his appearance. He loathed it. It did not become him, and it made him feel unkempt.

When he was dressed Hans would return to his self-appointed task of running the household. It was the least he could do, for Marushka was not only risking her life in his behalf, she was also virtually supporting him. Hans had brought a number of Indian bronzes with him from the apartment he had shared with his mother, which Marushka sold piecemeal from time to time as money was needed. However, the bronzes were not especially valuable and did not bring in enough money to cover expenses. It was Marushka who earned a steady income from her many odd jobs—she was now inspecting slaughterhouses and working for the German equivalent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—and from black market trading. The fact was that Hans was now dependent on Marushka for everything—even his haircuts. Her hairdresser had told her of the many Jews who had been seized while visiting beauty and barber shops. Marushka told him she knew of a Jew in hiding, a man who desperately needed a haircut, and he had taught her how to cut hair.

Hans was not good at household tasks, nor did he enjoy them. It was not that he was unwilling or felt demeaned; it was just that he was inefficient, and nothing in his previous life had prepared him for such circumstances. All his life he had been attended to by either his mother or their housekeeper. Luzie Hirschel had encouraged her son's dependence as a means of keeping him for as long as she could. Ironically, certain women who were drawn to him initially because of his good looks became even more entranced when they discovered his dependency.

To a degree, Marushka was one of them. She enjoyed giving Hans his haircuts, or doing his wash—one household task Hans was never able to manage—but she was careful not to smother him. She esteemed what she called his “exquisite” brains, his philosophical bent, his cleverness, his wit. But she knew that Hans perceived himself in another light. Like many intellectuals, he wanted to be admired for his physical prowess almost more than his mind, and he would often boast about his accomplishments in such sports as tennis and boxing. The truth was that he was an all but hopeless athlete, and his boasts—considered in relation to his slim, almost frail physique—seemed like fantasies, which invariably sent Marushka into fits of laughter. One evening, recounting his experiences on the railroad gang before he went into hiding, he bragged of having lifted up a section of track that weighed 750 pounds. Marushka laughed so hard that he finally had to join her.

In the main, however, Hans was as well suited for a period of enforced seclusion as any man could be, and at the outset—before his mother's deportation and the baby's death—he had rather relished the privacy. Even now he admitted that the imprisonment had its uses. One of his greatest problems had always been to maintain his focus on the subject at hand. Coupled with the philosopher's love of abstractions, it had tended to make his writings diffuse and difficult to understand. Now, as his reality became more concrete and circumscribed, his work sharpened.

He had his one great intellectual passion to occupy him—his fascination with the dark side of even the most positive religious movement. But he also had a great deal of specific work—more, ironically, than he had ever had in normal times—articles, book reviews, radio plays, even short books. It was Marushka who would obtain the assignments, ostensibly for herself. She would then give them to Hans to do, along with the research materials he would need. When he finished a draft Marushka would rewrite it, not out of vanity but from caution. Their styles were poles apart. It would not have done for anyone to question the authorship.

Hans did an article on Jan Hus, a radio play about a Finnish general, a play on Cromwell, one on the Boer War. The Cromwell play was intended to show how nasty the British had been to the Irish, the Boer War play how savagely they had treated the Boers, even putting them in concentration camps. Everything that Hans wrote, however, contained a guarded put-down of the Nazis, which only the Nazis failed to recognize.

In the evenings Hans and Marushka would listen to radio plays written by party hacks and laugh at the bad style and awful structure. Together they wrote a play about Louis Napoleon, trying, for once, to do it on a high level. The play was rejected.

“Let's write the worst possible play we can,” Hans proposed. When they finished he said, “It's so vile, they'll never take it.” The script was accepted without revision.

Hans's working day began after a lunch of oatmeal or other cereal, which he would dutifully prepare and then often forgo. When he had finished with the writing assignments he would either read or work on a poem. When a poem was finished he would place it on Marushka's pillow. It was in these poems that his true feelings came out—his gratitude to Marushka, his sense of lost potential, his feeling of alienation from the normal pulse of life.

“Our love fills the black void between us,” he wrote in one of his poems. He was putting into as positive a context as he could the troubling knowledge that they had come from different worlds—Marushka from one dominated by an aristocratic mother who collected anti-Semitic literature, Hans from another, dominated by a worldly mother who moved in the highest literary circles. To an extent Hans's Jewishness—like his mother's and even his father's—had been largely replaced by his Germanness. He “felt” Jewish and was recognized as a Jew by others—the two fundamental criteria of whether one is or isn't a Jew—but he had no deep religious feeling. Because Marushka was such a free spirit, he had planned to defer to her in their child's religious training.

Since the 1870s, when Napoleonic concepts of equal rights gained acceptance in Germany, many Jews had shown their gratitude at being legitimized by becoming more German than the Germans. They supported the fatherland, both emotionally and practically. Yet even after Otto von Bismarck guaranteed civil rights to Jews in 1871, theory and reality were far apart. It took military service in World War I to make these rights, and full equality for Jews, an actuality. Almost 100,000 Jews had served in the army; 80,000 saw combat; 35,000 were decorated for bravery; 12,000 were killed. Hans himself had been decorated for his service in the final years of the great war, and he had supported Germany's aspirations wholeheartedly. He could not believe, let alone accept, what had happened since. In one poem, “The Song of a German Jew,” he tried to express what it meant to feel so German and then suddenly not be permitted to
be
German.

The reality of Hans's confinement grew more vivid with each day. The longer it went on, the more troubled he became. Discourse had been his life, and now he was all but deprived of it. Occasionally Marushka would bring home some fellow students, and Hans, posing as “Professor Schoeler,” would drill them in preparation for exams. The only friends Marushka could bring to him were those whose company tended to be unexciting; those friends engaged in touchy political work told Marushka it was better for everyone if they stayed away.

So, sadly, Hans's closest companions became the dogs—two Scotch terriers Marushka had bought to keep him company and also to breed for the income she could get from the puppies. Every morning Hans would groom the dogs and then play with them. When he did the household chores, he would talk to them. “Have you any idea where the towels might be?” he would ask. The dogs would stare at him and wag their tails. A little after ten Irmelin Patrick, the fiancée of one of Marushka's nephews, would come to take the dogs for their morning walk; Hans would peek through the curtain and watch them play. At eleven o'clock they would return for their meal. “I've got a lovely meal for you today,” he would tell them. “You'll start off with a fine soup—bouillon with egg and cream. Then you're having venison with a cream sauce and red currant jelly. For dessert a splendid sorbet.” Then he would serve them their dog food.

Despite his circumstances Hans rarely showed moodiness or despair. He refused to be destroyed, either by his own imprisonment or the threats of capture. His greatest problem was in coming to terms with the baby's death. He thought its moment of life had been senseless. “No!” Marushka argued one evening. “Every human being has some destiny to fulfill. This child, in one day, had a reason for his existence. If it wasn't for him you would have been killed in Poland.” Hans looked away and closed his eyes. He was silent for several minutes. When he looked back at Marushka his eyes were shining. “I'll try to believe that,” he said.

Only once did he raise his voice. “This damned war! This damned Hitler!” he shouted one day after his mother was deported. “You have to go out and do all this filthy work while I sit here helpless.” But at all other times he remained amazingly equable, considering what he was going through. If he did feel himself slipping into despondency, he would play with the dogs or talk to the birds. Marushka had cages of them—finches, canaries, parrakeets. When Marushka arrived home in the evening his first order of business would be to tell her how the dogs had played that day and how the birds had sung.