The Last Jews in Berlin (20 page)

Hella, on the other hand, was so calm that she would often read a novel by candlelight during the raids. Her courage amazed Beppo. “This house will not be hit by a bomb,” she kept assuring them, “No house in which so much good has been done could be hit by a bomb.” To Kurt she would say, softly but emphatically, “We are going to survive.”

But as the attacks continued without letup, the strain became unbearable. Something had to be done. The more they talked about it, the more clear it became that Kurt would have to leave Berlin, if only for a while, in order to relieve the pressure. There was a perfect place for him to go—the farm in Pomerania owned by Kadi's parents. But how on earth would they get him there?

“I have said
A
, I must now say
B,”
Beppo told himself again and again, meaning that, having told Kurt he would help him initially, he must now meet his further needs. In his office one day Beppo executed an official leave-of-absence document, a pink piece of paper on which he listed his own name, his occupation, and the dates of his “leave.” Then he gave the document to Kurt, to show to the authorities in case he was stopped on the train en route to the farm. Beppo could only pray that the leave paper, together with Kurt's fake postal identity, would be enough for the authorities. If the authorities became suspicious and checked back with Beppo's office, he knew that he was finished.

To minimize the risk of detection, the trip was scheduled for a time on the weekend when Beppo's office would be closed. Should the police request his military papers, Kurt could say that they were locked in his office for safekeeping. There would be no way the police could check that statement on the weekend, and so, rather than bother, they might let the matter slide.

But the trip passed without incident, and Kurt, Hella, Kadi and the baby arrived safely at Kadi's parents' farm in Pomerania. There was no question about the Riedes' welcome; there was the added practical advantage of having extra hands for the potato harvest at a time when farm labor was scarce. It was hard, monotonous work, done in an uncomfortable kneeling posture, but Kurt's joy was unbridled. At last he could do something that was tangible and physical and helpful to others as well as himself.

For four weeks they pushed their shovels into the rich soil and dug out potatoes, and lived with the assurance that the Allied planes passing overhead would not drop their bombs on them. If he could have, Kurt would have gladly spent the rest of the war working on the farm, but that, he knew, was impossible. He was being passed off to the neighbors as a soldier on convalescent leave; to stay longer than a month would be to invite suspicion and trouble, not only for himself but for Kadi's parents.

So at the end of the month Kadi's sister drove them in a horse-drawn cart to the farm of Beppo's parents, twenty kilometers away. Their reception here was very different. “Get these people away from me,” Beppo's father muttered to Kadi when he learned who the Riedes were. Their presence endangered all of them, he argued. He was right, but no one else took his side, and eventually even he accepted their presence.

Four weeks later Kadi's sister came to collect them, and took them to the railway station, where they boarded a train for the return trip to Berlin, their satchels loaded with poultry, eggs, pork and produce. In his own suitcase Kurt proudly carried several geese back to the city.

Once again the journey was unquestioned.

Kurt felt reborn. Not only had he enjoyed a respite from the bombings for the better part of two months but he had met and passed a test of courage that had done wonders for his self-esteem. He had gone to the farms out of fear—but it had taken courage to go there. Twice he had run a gauntlet full of real and imagined dangers. The least display of anxiety on his part could have given him and the others away. As frightened as he had been, nothing outward had distinguished him from any other dispirited German traveler in the beginning of the fifth year of a war that all but the most fanatical of them now knew their country was going to lose.

Safely back in Wittenau, Kurt vowed not to let the bombings affect him, and he quietly went about arranging a way to express his gratitude to Kadi's parents. At their farm he had noticed that the drive belt on the flour grinder was so worn and frayed that it could scarcely power the mill. Now, from the baron's leather shop where he had once worked, he obtained a new belt to replace the old one—which, to Kadi's parents as well as all those the mill supplied with flour, was worth more at this moment than any sum of money.

There had been moments during his solitude when Willy Glaser would have traded a year of his life for an evening at the opera, but even he had to admit that life had improved. It had been six months since he had been forced to move from George Meier's summer home. A few days before he was supposed to vacate the house, and still with no place to go, he'd taken an enormous risk and told the truth to a neighbor. He'd just blurted it out on an impulse one day while he was working in the garden and the neighbor was leaning against the fence, exchanging pleasantries, all but inviting Willy to confide in him, hinting that he had already guessed Willy's story. Although the neighbor didn't look Jewish, and certainly hadn't said that he was, he made a point of using certain Yiddish expressions that had been adopted by many Germans. What was the man trying to convey? That he was friendly? That he had Jewish friends or business associates? That his wife was Jewish? Whatever the reason, Willy's surmise had been right. Once he had explained his predicament, the neighbor—who never told him his name—offered to let him use a small room on the second floor of his house. Conditions again. Willy was not to tell anyone where he was living. And he was never to be seen entering or leaving. Willy assured the man on both counts, and gratefully moved in.

Where his former house had been made of wood, and daylight was visible through the cracks, this one was built of stone and free of drafts. There were three rooms downstairs and a fourth on the second floor. That was where Willy lived.

In any other life this would have to be considered a wretched existence, but where the objective of life was survival alone, Willy could feel that he was doing well. Not only was he secure; for the first time since he had gone illegal he was warm. He could light a lamp at night. His benefactor extracted hard labor in exchange for the shelter—Willy chopped cords and cords of wood—but he was a kind man who had even lanced a dreadful boil on the back of Willy's neck.

Willy kept his word. He told no one where he lived. And on the days when he wanted to leave the house he would be gone by 5:00
A.M.
and would not return until after dark. When the air raids began in the evenings he would run into the woods for shelter. From there he would watch the flares they called “Christmas trees” light up the ground, and the bombs burst near the antiaircraft emplacements a few miles away. But no bombs had even come close to his hiding place—still further evidence that divine Providence guarded him or that his life was somehow charmed.

And then one day in November 1943 Willy Glaser's luck ran out.

That morning he had chopped half a cord of wood for the owner, gotten tired and gone to his room to nap. He was awakened by voices in the garden. Instinctively he raised his head to peep out the window. It was at just that moment that one of the two men standing in the garden happened to look up.

“Who are you?” he called out.

Paralyzed with fear, Willy didn't answer.

“Come down here!” the man commanded.

In the garden, Willy could see a party insignia on the man's coat.

“What is your name?” the man said.

“Wilhelm Glaser.”

“Are you a Jew?”

“No.”

They handcuffed him and took him to the police station in Müggelheim. The police asked to see his papers. He had none. They asked where he had previously lived. He gave them his correct address. They called the police station in his old neighborhood and learned not only that he was Jewish but that he had escaped once before.

Several hours later Willy was in the basement of the heavy stone building on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse where Jews scheduled for deportation were gathered, the very building to which he had gone to say goodbye to his mother and to which he had been on his way ten months before. He was filled with bitterness. Ten months of cold, hunger, loneliness and danger endured, only to be captured.

20

F
ROM THE DAY
that she and Mother had moved into Frau Otto's apartment in Pankow, Ruth Thomas had done her best to forget that she was a Jew, as Tante Lisel had admonished her to. It was an act of pretense that, given her upbringing and her memories, as well as the sheer joy she had experienced as a young Jewish woman, made all of her previous efforts at masking reality seem small by comparison. Not only could there be no religious observance of any kind, there could be no nostalgia for those culturally rich and festive times. Nor could she afford self-pity; whatever she felt about life in Berlin could be no more and no less than what any Berliner felt.

By way of commemorating her new identity, Ruth destroyed her Jewish star and her mother's as well. The only remnant of her past she kept was her identity card. She knew she would need the card when this nightmare ended, and so she sewed it into the hem of the gray flannel skirt she wore the most often.

In the first days on their own, both Ruth and her mother had been so frightened that they could not bring themselves to venture into the street. They would rise early and eat a meager breakfast. While Ruth sewed, Anna would clean the house and prepare food if they had it. Often they would go without lunch. Inevitably the day came when they had to risk a trip to the market, where they nervously bought a few turnips and potatoes with small bits of the money they had taken with them into exile. From then on, Mother went out only when she absolutely had to. Ruth's work, however, required that she leave the apartment more and more frequently—a fact of life that was as much a blessing as it was a danger. As she had known it would, the sewing machine had become their means of survival. Soon after she and Mother had moved into the Pankow apartment, word spread that there was a clever woman who could tailor very well. Before long she had all the customers she could handle, all of them happy to have someone fashioning the materials their husbands were bringing in from the conquered lands.

Whenever either Ruth or her mother went out, whether it was to pick up work or procure food, they carried all their money with them. It was a precaution against the possibility that they might be followed and therefore not be able to return to their sanctuary, or that the sanctuary itself might be discovered while they were away.

Every trip to the market was a gamble. Some of their food they bought on the black market, but Ruth hated to do it, certain that it had been the address book of a black marketeer that had brought them to the Gestapo's attention the previous November. Once a week a bakery woman in the Fasanenstrasse would give Ruth a loaf of bread. Another merchant would give her vegetables. Although the shopkeepers never spoke about it, Ruth knew that they were anti-Nazis. The people who didn't overcharge you were always those opposed to the regime.

As each day passed and nothing happened, Ruth's fantasy mechanism gradually became charged again and she could repress those awful memories that could destroy her will to resist. She had had one horrible relapse. A Belgian she knew had sold her a small radio. Each night Ruth would put the radio under her pillow and listen to the BBC and the Russian broadcasts. One night the Russians reported that the Nazis had been killing Jews in gas chambers and cremating their remains. Smoke was pouring from the crematoria chimneys, the Russians said. Ruth refused to believe it. She couldn't accept that Kurt Thomas would be killed in this way. She could not accept that Germans would be capable of such monstrosities.

But given her good fortune relative to other Jews, it was difficult for Ruth not to feel that she was living life in a protective bubble. Except for the fact that she was an illegal, being sought by the Gestapo, her existence was in truth no different from the average Berliner's. She walked the streets, took streetcars, shopped and from time to time even visited with friends. On streetcars men would stand and offer her their seats, even as they had before she had gone illegal.

Often Ruth would work in her customers' homes, and though she never told them that she was Jewish, she suspected that some of them knew. It was not insignificant that she never heard any discussions of the Jews, let alone an anti-Semitic remark, even though she was certain that some of her customers were Nazis. At that time only Nazis could afford the exquisite materials that Ruth worked on, and could pay for her work with food. They never asked her for her papers, because they were only too happy to have someone sewing for them, especially someone with Ruth's flair for design. If her customers offered her a choice of payment in either money or food and ration stamps, Ruth would choose the food and ration stamps. Between those payments and the food her friend Hilde Hohn was supplying, Ruth and her mother soon had enough to eat.

Hilde had an advantageous job. She was in charge of arranging documents and licenses for imports on behalf of a chain of small markets. So she had access to food. In addition, she traveled every weekend to the old manor house of her husband's parents and brought back supplies of food. Five persons, including Ruth and her mother, counted on her to supplement their diets. Ruth paid for what Hilde brought her, but there was always a little something extra from Hilde's in-laws, along with a message that they were praying for her to their patron saint, Saint Anthony.

Ruth and Hilde saw a great deal of each other. As they had suspected from their first encounter, they were very much alike. Both were young and pretty and chic. Ruth made a dress for Hilde of dark blue and pink silk, with slightly puffed sleeves, a pink yoke, a dark blue bodice with a full skirt and three pink bands near the hem. Hilde was ecstatic. Twirling in front of the mirror, she announced, “I am the best-dressed woman in Berlin.” A few days later Ruth accompanied Hilde on a drive to Gatow, a small community alongside the Havel River, on the southern outskirts of the city.