The Last Jews in Berlin (19 page)

But it was in a semipermanent resident named Hollander that Hans took the most delight. They had met in 1938, after Hans had lost his job and was being retrained as a metallurgist. Hollander was in the same class. They were approximately the same age, and while Hollander did not have Hans's intellectual gifts, he was nonetheless an intelligent and spirited man. Hans's one concern was that Hollander might be too spirited; he insisted on going out at some point each day to visit his mistress, a practice that Hans feared might jeopardize Marushka's safety, his own, and the safety of the other Jews sheltered in the flat.

But Hans said nothing for the moment, because he too had begun to leave the flat from time to time—an adventure made possible by yet another spectacular change in his life. With Marushka's help he had acquired an impressive piece of identity that could pass most normal checks.

Even though her sentiments were suspect, Marushka was still a countess and still immensely popular among Berlin's elite. Consequently she was often invited to dinner parties, and she almost always accepted—first, because it meant a good meal and, second, because she might pick up some valuable information. It was at one such party, given by the Ministry of Administration, that she had met Werner Keller, a tall, blond, good-looking man of thirty-two who had been a writer in civilian life and, after a brief career as a pilot, had gone to work for Albert Speer's Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Keller's look struck Marushka as both studious and thoughtful, which made his association with Speer seem incongruous.

Keller, as it turned out, was no Nazi. “I'd love to have a real conversation with you,” he said after they had been introduced by a mutual friend. “We can't do that here.” Marushka sensed that his interest wasn't romantic. She knew that Keller was married, and had sent his wife and children to their country home on the Elbe for their safety. Anti-Nazis, she believed, had a way of gravitating toward one another. When Keller telephoned her a few days after the dinner party, she remarked that she couldn't quite understand how he could be working where he was. It was an observation that could have meant a dozen things, but Keller knew what she was saying. “It's a very good place to be,” he said. “You can help a lot of people.” Another ambiguous statement—but now they both understood each other.

When she was certain she knew him well enough, Marushka invited Keller to the flat to meet Hans. It was at the end of Hans's longest period of isolation, and he was overjoyed to have a visitor. When he found out that Keller was a writer, Hans was beside himself. The two men talked for hours. Afterward Marushka said with great care, “Werner, what do you think the chances would be of getting some papers for Hans?”

“I think that could be arranged,” Keller said after a silence that to Hans had seemed like an eternity.

The next time he appeared, Werner brought a paper that identified Hans as an official of the Ministry of Armaments and War Production. Marushka attached a photograph of Hans to the document, photograph and document were duly stamped, and Hans suddenly had a new identity. By way of celebration, Marushka took him out to Keller's country house late the following Saturday morning, and fetched him early Monday morning. She was willing to risk the trip with Hans's new document, but she did not quite trust him to brazen his way alone out of a tight spot if he should find himself in one.

A year had passed since Hans had moved into the flat. Marushka's thirty-fourth birthday, on March 25, 1943, was approaching. To Hans's astonishment she proposed that they have a party, and set about arranging it. Her guest list of twenty friends, most of whom knew about Hans, included an actor from Vienna, a girlhood friend, a writer and his wife, and two exquisite Jewish women, Maria Etlinger and Annchen Foss, who were also living illegally. But others would be coming who did not knows Hans—several young officers attached to the veterinary school where Marushka had been trained, and an army major named Von Borker, who had been flirting with Marushka for months now and pestering her to invite him to her house. Borker insisted that they had many mutual friends and that they might even be related by marriage. Marushka considered Borker such a fool that he wouldn't recognize a Jew when he saw one. She was sure that Hans could easily carry off a masquerade. He would pretend that he was “Professor Schoeler”—just as he had done when he had prepped her fellow students for their exams—with a chair in economics at the university. There was a certain risk involved, but there was a risk if she didn't dispose of Borker somehow; he might begin to disbelieve her story that she lived alone. Besides, he was on the verge of obtaining a Mauser pistol for her, because, she had told him, she felt unsafe living by herself. She very much wanted that pistol.

The party began at six o'clock. Marushka had collected a quantity of food from her black market sources as well as from peasants whose livestock she castrated. There was a greater variety of food, and in greater abundance, than the guests had seen in a long time—meats, sausages, cheese from France, dishes made with eggs. Marushka, carefully made up and wearing a brown dress, looked exceedingly feminine and beguiling. For her as well as for the others the party was a great release, and she proposed to make the most of it. There were many toasts, drunk with wine and schnapps. By the time Major von Borker arrived, the party was in high gear. He was astonished by the crowd—Marushka hadn't told him it was her birthday—and upset that he hadn't brought flowers.

There was no need to warn the others about Borker because he was wearing his officer's uniform. Nonetheless there were some anxious looks when Marushka introduced him to “Professor Schoeler.”

“How are your students these days?” Borker asked stiffly.

“Very poor,” Hans replied. “All the good students are soldiers.”

Before Hans could be tested any further Marushka led Borker over to Maria Etlinger and Annchen Foss. “This is the man I was telling you about, with such a wonderful feeling for race,” she said with a smile.

From that moment on, Borker had eyes only for Annchen Foss, whose striking beauty blinded him to its Sephardic Jewish antecedents. “Have you children?” he asked after a bit.

“No,” Annchen replied.

“What a pity,” Borker sighed. “Children of yours would be such a credit to the German nation.”

Behind Borker, Maria Etlinger leaned back against a wall, closed her eyes and put a hand across her mouth to stifle her helpless laughter.

An hour later, after voicing his approval of the recent mass deportation of Jews from Berlin, Borker departed. For a moment no one spoke. Then Marushka said, “Come on, everybody, let's dance.” She put a fox trot on the phonograph and led Hans to the center of the room. All the guests applauded. It was after two when the last guest went home.

The next time he saw Marushka, Borker gave her the Mauser.

Six months had passed. The air raids had suddenly and dramatically intensified, a fact of life made all the more vivid for Hans and Marushka because their street, Detmolder Strasse, ran parallel to and fifty yards from an S-Bahn track along which flak trains—flat cars with antiaircraft guns mounted on them—ran during the raids. Their neighborhood got more than its share of bombs, but they welcomed the raids, and neither one of them was frightened, if only because it made no sense to fear something you welcomed. Hans even toyed with the idea of walking the deserted streets during the raids so that he might experience the feeling of absolute assurance that he wouldn't be detected. Everyone else would be in the air raid shelters.

He of course could not go to the shelters. His refuge was the cellar beneath their flat. The walls and ceilings of the cellar had been reinforced, and there were storage bins along each side. During the raids the shelter also served as a kennel for the dogs.

One evening in September, just as the diminishing sound of the planes indicated that a particularly heavy raid had ended, Marushka heard a bomb crash in the street. An instant later an explosion shattered the store window into thousands of pieces and scattered them throughout the flat. Later Hans discovered that tiny particles of glass had been driven through his wardrobe by the force of the explosion and had cut all of his shirts into tatters.

The explosion had also demolished the front entrance. Early the next morning Marushka foraged for some boards, then nailed them over the space where the window had been, and closed off the front entry as well. Now one could enter and leave the apartment only through the kitchen.

The pounding of the English bombs continued. Buildings at either side of theirs received direct hits. And then, one day, theirs did too.

In the cellar Hans thought the world had come to an end. He held the two Scotch terriers in his arms, trying to comfort them. At last the all clear sounded, and he and Marushka went upstairs to have a look at the damage. When they saw it they could only wonder how they were still alive. The explosion had destroyed all of their building, with the exception of their flat and the one above theirs. The ceiling of their living room sagged dangerously and looked as though it could give way at any moment. Marushka went out at once to scavenge for a beam with which to prop it up. By a great stroke of luck she found one, as well as a crew to help her carry it home and install it.

It was October now, and the weather had turned brisk. Each day Marushka would eye the window frames stacked up outside the store of a glazier down the street. The frames had been brought to him to have the glass replaced. What a lovely supply of fuel, Marushka thought. The next chance she had, she approached the glazier, who she knew was an ardent Nazi, and gave him what he agreed was an inspired idea. He should segregate the frames—those of the good Nazis on the left side of the door, those of the nonparty members on the right. In that way he could attend to the good Nazis first. From that day on, that was how he did it, and from that evening on, Marushka helped herself to the window frames of the party members.

Marushka was often out in the evenings now, which would have bothered Hans even more than it did if he hadn't had one or more illegal Jews to keep him company. She never told him in advance that she would be going out, and she never said anything on her return. All he knew for certain was that her departures coincided with those mysterious phone calls: two rings, followed by a minute's interval, another two rings, another interval, and finally one more ring and a muffled conversation.

During the fall Marushka was also away from Berlin for several days, visiting one of her sisters in Munich. When she returned to Berlin she was aghast to see Hans waiting on the station platform to meet her. Even though he now had his false identification papers, each sortie was still a risk, and train stations were a special risk because they were so heavily patrolled.

“Please don't be angry,” Hans pleaded. “I've missed you. I wanted to surprise you. And I just had to get out of the flat.”

Marushka sighed. “Oh, God,” she said. “Come on.”

They boarded an S-Bahn train, but before they had gotten very far the bombing started, and passengers and crew abandoned the train for the nearest shelter. “Now we're in for it,” Marushka muttered as she led a sheepish-looking Hans inside. She pulled Hans off to the darkest corner she could find, and they managed to find floor space in spite of the crowd. The raid went on and on, and as it did, Hans became increasingly fidgety. “Can't we go over there?” he whispered to Marushka, pointing to a space about thirty feet away that did not seem nearly so crowded.

“What's the matter with this space?” Marushka demanded.

“The crowd over there seems nicer,” Hans said with a laugh, but Marushka figured he was only half kidding. In the center of that space sat a handsome, intelligent-looking man chatting with another man.

“We'd better stay where we are,” Marushka said. “If we move we'll only draw attention to ourselves.”

At last the all clear sounded. As Hans and Marushka rose to leave they happened to notice that as the handsome man across the way rose, the man he had been talking to rose with him. Then they saw why. The men were handcuffed together.

Hans and Marushka watched in silence as the two men walked away. All the way back to the apartment Hans did not make a comment.

19

T
HE AREA AROUND
Wittenau, at the northern fringe of Berlin, was an inviting target for the Allied bombers because of its concentration of factories, supply yards and offices engaged in war production. No bomb had yet fallen near the house of Robert Jerneitzig occupied by the Wirkuses and the Riedes, but the noise of the explosion made the points of impact seem extremely close.

Night after night the bombers came, their arrival preceded by a period of grace when, warned of the imminent attack by German military broadcasts, residents of the presumed target areas could rush to the community shelters. Joseph Wirkus always took his wife, Kadi, and son, Wilfried, to their neighborhood shelter, five hundred yards away. It took them five minutes to get there, and then he would run back home to sit out the raid in his small basement shelter with Kurt and Hella Riede. He was less safe from the bombs in the basement than he would have been in the shelter, but there was a more important consideration. As illegal Jews the Riedes could not go to the community shelters without risking exposure; his own presence in the basement, Beppo reasoned, would reassure the Riedes—especially Kurt.

The bombs terrified Kurt. He readily admitted that he was more afraid of them than he was of the Gestapo. It had nothing to do with cowardice; it was the vulnerability he felt because he was night-blind. Air raids meant dimness, even darkness, which meant, in turn, that he couldn't see. He felt trapped and helpless in the cellar, and often became so upset that he was forced to risk a trip upstairs, with Hella's assistance, to go to the bathroom.