The Last Jews in Berlin (24 page)

Perwe's first involvement with the beleaguered Jews had occurred in 1935 when he went to Vienna to observe the rescue efforts of Hedenqvist, an old friend and colleague. On his return to Sweden, Perwe lectured extensively on the plight of the Jews in Austria; one by one, he stated, they were disappearing. At each of his lectures Swedish Nazis would march noisily into the meeting place and heckle him. But Perwe kept talking, and his speeches came to the attention of Archbishop Earling Eidem, who decided that Perwe, whom he had known since his student days, belonged in Berlin. In 1939 the archbishop sent him there. His specific mission: to get Jews out of Germany.

What Perwe found dismayed him. It was not simply that by then the Jews were being persecuted in a manner and on a scale that had been unimaginable' to him, it was that his German brothers in God were, for the most part, doing nothing about it. Individual ministers and their congregants were trying to save baptized Jews, but, with a few courageous exceptions, almost nothing was being done to help the overwhelming majority of nonbaptized Jews, and—worst of all—the churches were officially silent. A few scattered sermons here and there, but otherwise no protests of any kind.

Why? Perwe asked himself. Was it because the churches feared for their own survival in the Third Reich, resounding with pagan overtones and the deification of Hitler? Or was it because they were so frightened of socialism and so nationalistic that they considered it necessary to support the Reich uncritically as it brought Germany back to life? Was it because they too, like most other Germans, had felt it would be good for the country to reduce the Jewish presence in business, the professions and the arts? Was it, finally, because the German churches, deep down, were uncomfortable about the Jews, saw them as aliens whose participation in the society somehow diluted the Germanic essence—because, in short, the churches, their clergy and parishioners, in the overwhelming majority of cases, simply didn't like Jews?

Whatever the reasons, whatever the answers, Perwe was appalled. He returned to Sweden in 1941 badly shaken by his experience. Forell's letter, which he received soon after his return, threw him into a quandary. He was not at all keen about taking his wife and three daughters—the eldest was only seven—into a war zone. And yet how could he refuse to go if his presence in Berlin might save the lives of even a few persecuted Jews? “Is this the answer to the question of the future?” he asked himself on one of the lined pages of the black soft-cover diary he filled regularly with brief yet tantalizing notes.

In the spring of 1942 the Nazis told Forell that he was no longer welcome in Germany. Forell informed Perwe. “God calls. I must obey,” Perwe wrote in his diary. On June 21 he received a telegram from Berlin confirming his election to the parish priesthood there. “God help me and us all,” he noted. The Perwe family left Sweden for Germany on the last day of August, an emotionally taxing transition he covered with two cryptic entries in his diary: “
August 31, 1942:
Departure from Norrköping to Berlin. Many people at the train to see me off. Touching, painful, encouraging.
September 1, 1942:
Train to Berlin. Many people. Very warm. Met by legation's car. At residence met Sister Vide. God bless our arrival.”

The Swedish church was in the reception hall of a large and gracious villa on the Landhausstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, an at tractive residential neighborhood. The street was lined with lin den trees. In the back of the villa was an enormous informal garden that ran the length of the block to the Kaiserallee, one of the major thoroughfares leading to the center of the city two miles to the north. To those who worked in the church or came to it for help the villa and garden, which was like a private park, seemed a world apart in wartime Berlin. The bombings would soon make it that almost literally. So many houses and apart ment buildings at both sides of the villa were flattened that the church stood virtually alone.

But it was the emotional ambience even more than its physical isolation that set the church apart. Whereas before the war the atmosphere had been moral, pious, even narrow, now it was expansive and often explosive—merry, easygoing, elastic, tolerant. Visitors to the church might be offered brandy and cigars—something seldom if ever observed there prior to the war. There was always a pot of soup and another of coffee on the stove; anyone who needed a meal got one, whatever the hour. Sides of pork hung from the pegs on which women parishioners had once placed their fur coats. There were so many unexpected visitors that the staff's sleeping quarters were often preempted, forcing them to double up. They didn't mind that or the eighteen hours of work they often put in each day. They knew that they were experiencing the kind of community they had always hoped to find in service to the Church but had never previously encountered. The people they helped helped them in turn, looking upon them as saviors, operators of a way station on the road to salvation. They knew they weren't superfluous, and no matter how difficult their work became, that knowledge made life easy—at least for the kind of people they were.

The most exuberant among them was Sister Vide Ohmann, a trained nurse functioning additionally as a social worker in these emergency times. Sister Vide was a vivacious young woman whose lovely face, as fresh as a milkmaid's, broadcast her turbulent emotions. A lifelong resident of Berlin, she had translated all the anguish and anger and confusion she felt over the changes produced by the Nazis into a single, powerful desire to help the victims of its policies. She walked about the church and residence with a look that said, “If you want my hands, here they are.” There was little that she and her colleagues were not prepared to do to make life easier for the Jews.

The major job of the women in the church was to care for the Jewish itinerants who regularly inhabited the building. There might be twenty at a time—bent, thin, seemingly without hope. Perwe would see them all. One day he said to Vide, “I'm not living one life. I'm living twenty every day.” Precisely how the minister helped the Jews the women never knew. They put it out of their minds. “Please never ask when you see anything here,” Perwe had told them. “It's better that you don't know.”

Part of what the minister was doing was creating false identities. The best possible paper was the
Kennkarte
, the obligatory national identity card. To obtain it one had to show a certificate of baptism. Such certificates could be readily counterfeited, but they had to be backed by the church's records. Accordingly, Jews who were given false baptismal certificates were also “inscribed” in the church's baptismal records, which went back to 1905.

And then, of course, there was the clandestine purchase of Jews from contacts in the Gestapo. Perwe was in charge of that operation as well, but he left it mostly in Wesslen's hands. He could not get over Wesslen. The man seemed drawn to danger. Why else would a man choose Berlin in the early 1940s, when the bombings had already begun, for his studies in landscape architecture? Wesslen was thirty years old, but he seemed at times to have the outlook of an adventure-loving schoolboy. The greater the risk, the more he liked it. He still looked somewhat like a schoolboy too, innocent and good-natured. His manner was so open that no one would ever have suspected him of wrongdoing. In fact, he had a flair for anything and everything crooked. He was a master at getting along with and using the Gestapo. His underground contacts were seemingly inexhaustible. A feverishly active man, he knew where to trade a bottle of brandy for a set of tires, a pound of butter for a tank of gas. His bartering supplies—food, wine and cigarettes obtained from Sweden—were as plentiful as his contacts and his energy.

The most valuable thing the church could give the Jews was, ultimately, a safe place to stay. It was Perwe who would give out these addresses, most of which he obtained from a man named Reuter, the maintenance chief of the church. Reuter was an elderly German of medium stature, with white hair, a sad, bleak face and a big nose on which was precariously perched an ancient pair of glasses. His clothes were old and baggy. He gave every appearance of being a poor, insignificant man, and he frightened the women in the church because he was often so disagreeable. He would appear fairly regularly to have a meal, with a pack of papers or a bag stuffed under his arm, but he rarely ate with the staff, and he almost never spoke to them. Once in a great while he would smile, and then he seemed like another person. Where Reuter got his list of safe houses not even Perwe knew. All he knew was that if Reuter offered them, they were safe.

But within two or three weeks after the Jews had gone to the safe houses they would be back at the church, saying that the Gestapo was on their trail. Perwe never knew if this was true. It might be the Jews' imagination; it might be that the Germans sheltering them were also getting nervous. In any case, he would have to find them new places to stay. Sometimes there would be no places, and when that happened Perwe would let the Jews remain in the basement of the church for several days, even weeks. Inevitably there came the day when, of necessity, a Jew became a quasi-permanent resident of the church.

His name was Erich Müller. He was a violinist from Leipzig, in his forties, a seemingly inconsequential man who did not attract attention both because his manner and appearance were so unprepossessing and because he did not have Semitic features. Until this moment the combination had helped him survive. But when the Perwes met him during their first weeks in Berlin he had all but lost control. Several years before, Perwe's predecessor, Birger Forell, had slipped Müller's son into Sweden; now Müller desperately needed another favor. He'd been living with his fiancée, who was also Jewish, and her mother, he explained. His fiancée was pregnant, and he had to arrange an abortion. Would the minister help him?

Before Perwe's conscience could be tested, Müller's fiancée miscarried. When she recovered she determined to leave Berlin for Fribourg, Switzerland, where she planned to live with relatives. Müller did his best to dissuade her, but she was adamant. Perwe supplied her with a backpack, clothes and food, and she set out. Weeks passed without word from her. Müller became so depressed that he threatened to take his life. His fiancée's mother ordered him from her home. On December 1, 1942, Müller moved into the church. He was quartered in a room in the attic, a tiny space that Forell had used as a study. The terms of his agreement with Perwe were that he confine himself to his room until ten o'clock each evening. Then he was permitted to walk outside on the terrace facing the garden.

Müller more than kept his part of the bargain. He would not even open the door when Martha Perwe brought him his tray of food. When she returned an hour later the tray would be where she had left it and the food would be untouched. In vain she implored him through the door to take some nourishment, but often he did not even respond. For days they neither saw nor heard him, and his fast went on. They feared that his confinement and his fiancée's disappearance were slowly driving him mad. In desperation one day, Martha laced some tea with amphetamines and took it to his door. That evening Müller appeared at last and said that he felt better. On Christmas Eve he came down again and played to them on his violin.

In March of 1943 two more Jews moved into the church on a semipermanent basis. Until that time Martin Weissenberg, a man in his early sixties, and his wife Margot, a woman twenty years younger, had managed to elude the Nazis, principally through the help of the sister of Horst Wessel, whose composition had become the party's official song and the secondary anthem of the Third Reich. Horst Wessel had been a childhood friend of Margot's. When the Nazis took power it was his sister who prevailed upon the Weissenbergs to send their children to England, provided them with food, clothing and medicine from her own scarce reserves, warned them when actions against the Jews were imminent, and once got them away from a hiding place minutes before the arrival of the Gestapo. Their resources exhausted, the Weissenbergs had walked the streets at night, hiding in abandoned buildings or in doorways or parks, until Perwe began to help them.

A friend, an active Social Democrat until Hitler took power and banned all parties but his own, had suggested they contact Perwe, who had already found refuges for several other Jewish friends. Three days after they saw him Perwe sent word that he had arranged quarters for them in a retirement home near the southern outskirts of Berlin. The home was run by an elderly German woman who not only took them in but did her best to stiffen their spirits. Other Jews had lived there before moving on to even safer lives, she confided, and not once had the Gestapo bothered them.

A few weeks later, however, the Gestapo did make a surprise visit, following a report by one of the elderly residents that Jews were living in the home. Luckily the Weissenbergs were away at the time shopping for food with ration cards just supplied them by Perwe, an adventure made somewhat safer by two postal identification cards Weissenberg had arranged through their former postman in exchange for ten cigars. After finding no Jews on the premises and hearing the administrator's fervent denials, the Gestapo dismissed the report as the product of a senile mind, and did not return.

The Weissenbergs lived in the retirement home without further incident through January and February of 1943. Mrs. Perwe brought them food to supplement their rations, and Perwe himself came to visit from time to time. To Martin Weissenberg, who in 1940 alone had lost twenty of his closest relatives, among them six brothers and sisters, whose own health had been undermined by forced labor, shoveling coal, his present life might have seemed, by comparison, a form of deliverance, except for one daily reminder: a song sung early each morning by S.S. troops quartered in a nearby barracks about how Jewish blood would spurt around their knives.

And then in March the retirement home was destroyed by a bomb. There were no casualties, because all the residents had been in bomb shelters, but the Weissenbergs were so distraught at the loss of their sanctuary that there were moments when they wondered if death was not preferable to the uncertainty that once again was their lot.