The Last Jews in Berlin (17 page)

“Next time look for your Jews elsewhere, not in the house of an S.S. man!” she said as she opened the door. When they were outside she banged it shut and then leaned against the wall, afraid that her legs would give way if she tried to reach a chair.

In the next weeks Ruth moved ten times, carrying her belongings from place to place in a shopping bag as though she was returning from a trip to the store. Her first refuge was at the home of a “privileged” uncle. A few days later she joined her mother at the home of friends of her grandparents' housekeeper. Then she went to a house in Schöneberg maintained by a woman she scarcely knew, and then to the woman's sister, and then to several residences whose inhabitants were so anonymous that her existence there became a blur. Ruth refused to stay longer than a few days in any location, believing that it was safer for her to keep moving—and also safer for her benefactors, who were taking an enormous risk on her behalf.

During all this time Ruth went out of her way to avoid other Jews or to have any meetings with them, fearing they might fall into the hands of the Gestapo and reveal her whereabouts. But one day she chanced upon a Jewish girl friend, herself an illegal, and this friend recommended that Ruth hide with a woman named Louisa Knispel.

Tante Lisel—as Ruth immediately called Louisa Knispel because a niece of Frau Knispel's who lived with her called her that—looked like the typical German housewife. She was heavyset, with blue eyes and long blond braids wound around her head. As a young girl she had worked for a Jewish professor in Strasbourg and cared for his children. Before the war she had been a Social Democrat and had despised the National Socialists. She was more than eager to help Ruth, and busied herself with the task of making Ruth's stay enjoyable. She was a very good cook, and she liked Ruth very much. But she was also difficult, principally because she was compulsively hygienic. If Ruth would take a drink of water and forget to wash the glass, Tante Lisel would run to the kitchen crying, “One can't live this way. This is impossible.” Ruth would want to explode in turn, but her life depended on Tante Lisel and there was nothing she could do.

For days the two women moved miserably about the house, each one liking the other, each one knowing that it was the extraordinary time they were experiencing that was making them act in such a high-strung manner, yet each one powerless to ease the tension between them.

And then a friend of Tante Lisel's, a Frau Otto, a civil servant, was suddenly transferred to Posen. The first thing she did was to call Tante Lisel to ask if she knew anyone reliable who could sublet her apartment. It was imperative that she find someone, Frau Otto explained, because if she left the apartment vacant she might eventually lose it. Tante Lisel told Frau Otto that her fears were over. She had the perfect tenants.

Ruth Thomas explained herself to Frau Otto by saying that she was half Jewish. She introduced her mother as her aunt from the non-Jewish side of the family. She said that they had been bombed out of Schöneberg, where they had maintained a home. She explained that Frau Otto could not register them with the police, because if the police knew they were living someplace else, they might lose title to their home.

As she listened to the story Frau Otto nodded sympathetically. She knew what it meant to be threatened with the loss of a home, she told them. But Ruth surmised that Frau Otto probably suspected the truth and just as probably didn't want to know. She asked no questions. When she departed it was with the prayer that Ruth and her mother would preserve her home.

Tante Lisel had one word of advice for Ruth as she prepared to move. “Forget that you're Jewish,” she said. “Your mother too. You'll never make it if you keep going the way you are. Don't tell anyone your story.”

Early in the fall Ruth and her mother moved into the apartment in Pankow, on the north side of Berlin. It was a small, three-room apartment on the top floor of a narrow building. It was not comfortable, but it did have a stove and hot water, and it was a hiding place.

And it also had a sewing machine.

To Ruth it seemed only natural that the sewing machine would be there. She was determined to survive, and she knew, beyond all doubt, that with a sewing machine she could—and pull Mother through, as well.

16

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20, 1943, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “The Fuehrer is happy over my report that the Jews for the most part have been evacuated from Berlin.” But four weeks later, on April 18, he was not quite so sanguine: “The Jewish question in Berlin has not found its final solution yet. There still remain a considerable number of Jews by law, Jews in privileged mixed marriages and even Jews in simple mixed marriages, here in the city. This presents grave problems. At any rate I am issuing an order that all the Jews still living in Berlin be re-assessed. I do not want any more Jews wearing the Jewish star to be seen walking around in the capital of the Reich. They should either be allowed to go without the star and granted the rights of privileged ones, or be deported for good from the capital.” Then Goebbels added a note of self-encouragement: “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that purging Berlin of its Jews is the greatest of my political achievements. Whenever I remember the sight of Berlin on my arrival here in 1926 and compare it to its appearance in 1943, after the Jews have been evacuated, only then can I appreciate the greatness of our achievement in this field.”

On May 19, 1943, the Nazis proclaimed Berlin
Judenfrei
. It was not true, as the Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda well knew. Official figures compiled by the Reichsvereinigung, the association of German Jews, at the behest of the Nazis, had listed 18,515 Jews still in Berlin as late as March 31. This figure, however, included all those Jews who were theoretically immune from deportation, the very Jews cited by Goebbels in his diary entry of March 20. (“Jews by law” were those Jews with one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent who themselves were practicing Jews as of September 15, 1935.)

The category of Jews to which the communique undoubtedly referred was the “nonprivileged” one, which was not protected in any way by the Third Reich's complex racial laws. It was this group Goebbels cited when he noted on March 11, “We … failed to lay our hands on 4,000.” After the war the Jewish community of Berlin estimated on the basis of its own reconstruction that 5,000 Jews had gone underground. Other estimates ranged between 2,000 and 9,000.

Whatever the exact figure as of February 27, 1943, the date of Operation Factory, it is certain that by May 19 the number of illegal Jews remaining in Berlin had been drastically diminished. In that twelve-week period hundreds of underground Jews had been captured and deported or killed outright, or had committed suicide, or had died from malnutrition or fright or lack of medication.

On June 10 the Gestapo appeared at the main office of the Jewish community on the Oranienburger Strasse, announced that the community had ceased to exist and arrested all those employees with no “Aryan blood.” At the same time, other Gestapo agents were arresting employees of the Reichsvereinigung, on the Kantstrasse. The Jews were taken to the Grosse Hamburger Strasse collection center. On June 16 a furniture van conveyed them to the Putlitzstrasse railway station, where they were put aboard a transport, along with five hundred Jews who had been taken from their sick-beds in the Jewish hospital on the Iranische Strasse early that morning.

But the hospital itself continued to function, manned by Jewish physicians, nurses and support personnel, and its administrative offices now became the headquarters of a new, curtailed Reichsvereinigung set up to handle such Jewish affairs as remained, particularly the disposal of Jewish property. Many Jews who had escaped the deportations were pressed into administrative services by the Gestapo. In almost all cases these Jews were related by marriage to non-Jews. Few of them doubted, however, that as the number of Jews in Berlin continued to dwindle, they too would soon be on the transports.

With the help of the
Mundfunk
, Kurt and Hella Riede had kept abreast of developments. They knew that they were on the Reichsvereinigung lists, that they were unaccounted for, and that it was only a matter of time before they would be found and deported.

They had slipped back into their Kaiserstrasse apartment in Berlin without incident following their departure from Wittenau in mid-March. Kurt had even gone back to work at the leather-goods firm—yet another piece of luck.

In the firm was a Frau Hammerling who worked as a bookkeeper. On the floor of her apartment building in Reinickendorf, at the Scharfensee, lived a Gestapo civil servant with whom she had become friendly. He had confided to her one evening that he worked in the division responsible for making up the transports of Jews to the east. From the tone of his remarks Frau Hammerling got the idea that he didn't approve of the policy. She decided to take a chance. “Look,” she said the next time they were together, “there's a man in our firm, a Jew, whom we all like very much. Do you suppose you could let me know when his name appears on the lists? I promise you complete silence.”

The civil servant pursed his lips. Then he nodded. “I could do that,” he said.

Only then did Frau Hammerling reveal Kurt's name—and even then she wondered if she had given his game away. It turned out that she hadn't.

One Monday morning Kurt walked into the office only to be summoned upstairs to see the baron. There, with the baron, was Frau Hammerling. She explained what she had done. Then she said, “They're coming for you sometime Wednesday evening.”

“Thank you,” Kurt said. In the next moment he was gone.

That afternoon, six weeks after they had left, the Riedes appeared once more at the Wirkuses' house in Wittenau. Beppo was at work, but Kadi was there. Kurt was shaking, and even Hella, who was normally calm, seemed distraught. Kurt explained what had happened. He asked if they could stay.

Kadi bit her lip. “There's a complication,” she told him. The look that crossed their faces made her ill. “There's a young woman living here. We had to take her in because we had so much space. Otherwise we would have lost the house.” She squeezed Hella's arm. “I'm sure we can work something out,” she said. “Beppo will think of something.”

Beppo's decision, when he returned from work, was to tell the young woman that Kurt was his brother, that he had found work nearby and was therefore coming to live with them.

The new tenant, whose name was Ursula, believed the story. She was not a suspicious sort and cared nothing for politics. She was young and blond and pretty and very well pleased with her life. She worked as a secretary in a factory that produced aircraft motors; you could see the factory from the house. The room she rented from the Wirkuses was on the first floor, off a hallway, but it had its own private entrance. Aside from the times she was invited for an occasional glass of schnapps or wine, she did not enter the other parts of the house.

After the initial shock of the Riedes' reappearance had been absorbed, the original harmonies were reestablished. At first Kurt remained indoors, but as the weeks passed and his confidence increased, he ventured outside to water the garden and trim the shrubs. Hella journeyed to the central city and even strolled the Kurfürstendamm, almost as if to reassure herself that she was immune to the probing eyes of the catchers. One evening the two couples went to the Oranienburger Strasse in Wittenau to see a film. By then the Riedes were feeling so confident that they began making trips to Brandenburg to visit Hella's parents. Kurt's heavy glasses were his pass in the neighborhood. All of the residents of Wittenau who saw him surmised that he had been exempted from military service because of poor eyesight and had a job in industry.

That was the story he told Ursula. Her own work began at seven, and she would not return home until after five. To explain why he was always at home when she left and returned, Kurt told her that his work started at eight and ended at four-thirty.

One evening Ursula left Kurt momentarily speechless when she announced she was taking the next day off. But he recovered quickly. “Great idea,” he said. “We'll stay home together and spend a nice, lazy day.”

Ursula never had a word to say about the war. Her one great interest was men. At home she flirted openly with both Beppo and Kurt whenever the chance presented itself, which delighted them and annoyed their wives. One evening the two couples were sitting in the kitchen when they heard a loud thump in the hallway, as though someone had dropped a sack of potatoes on the floor. The two men ran to see what had happened. There was Ursula, lying on the floor in a faint. They carried her to her room and put her on her bed. Hella came in a few moments later, pushed them from the room, and bathed Ursula's face with a wet towel. A few minutes later she emerged, disgusted. “This girl is faking,” she announced. “She's whitened her face with powder and painted her lips blue.”

One day in July, three months after the return of the Riedes, the Wirkuses had a visitor, an Augustine monk named Father Eusebius who lived in a nearby monastery. Father Eusebius had baptized their baby and had come to know the Wirkuses well because of their regular church attendance. He was surprised to see the Riedes, since the Wirkuses had never mentioned them. Now he asked who they were.

The Wirkuses told him the entire story. When they had finished he put his arms around both of them and said, “You mustn't be afraid. What you are doing is a good thing. I will include you in my prayers.” A few weeks later, after Sunday Mass, he slipped them some extra ration cards.

The longer the Riedes remained, the more natural their presence seemed to the Wirkuses. When Kadi went off to her parents' farm, Hella would take charge of the house, cleaning, preparing the meals. No one was ever alone, and all of them worked together, not simply on household chores but to keep one another's spirits up.