The Last Jews in Berlin (27 page)

Marushka could not believe what she saw. She knew the
J
stood for “Jews.” “Jews are living with Maltzan” was what that card said. She darted a look at the tailor's wife. Was there the slightest sign of suspicion in her eyes? If there was, Marushka couldn't see it. “Where did you find this?” she asked.

“On the floor. Two gentlemen came and asked for you early this afternoon. One of them must have dropped it.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I said you were at work.”

Marushka mumbled her thanks, turned and ran into the flat. She dumped the books on the kitchen counter and rushed into the sitting room. “For God's sake, Hans, it's the Gestapo,” she whispered. “Get into the couch.” The greeting he had been about to give her died on his lips. Without a word he rushed for the couch.

Marushka took several deep breaths to calm herself. In vain she tried to will her thundering heart into silence. At last she swallowed, and walked to the street to get another load of books.

It was then that she saw them—a woman and two men. The woman was young, blond, attractive, and fashionably dressed.

Out of the corner of her eye Marushka saw the two men move toward her as she picked up a fresh load of books. She carried the books into her flat. By the time she had dumped them on the kitchen table the men were at her back door. One was a small man, overdressed, wearing a gold bracelet and diamond ring. He was about thirty, and when he looked at her he scowled. The second man was about forty, blond, with an open, friendly look.

“We're Gestapo,” the small man said.

“What do you want from me?”

“We understand that you have Jews living here.”

“What? That's ridiculous.”

“We know that a Jewish girl used your place for two weeks.”

Marushka gaped at them. “That's simply not true.”

“Do you deny that a girl lived here?” the small man asked.

“No. A girl did live here. But she wasn't Jewish. She had perfectly good papers.”

“Those papers were forgeries.”

Marushka threw up her hands. “How should I have known that?”

The little man looked at her contemptuously. “The girl was not the only one. We know you've been hiding Jews.”

Marushka pulled herself erect. She advanced on the little man, all but backing him up with her breasts. “Look
here
, whoever you are. I'm not going to stand such insults.” Without taking her eyes from the man she stretched out her arm and pointed at the picture of her father hanging on the wall. “My father was the Count von Maltzan and an officer under the Kaiser. My mother was a well known anti-Semite. I am a good German. What makes you think I would have anything to do with Jews?”

The smile the smaller man gave her now was more like a smirk. “Then I'm sure you won't mind if we search your flat?”

“Whatever you like,” Marushka said, dismissing him with a wave.

The older man came up to her now. “I hope you understand,” he said apologetically. “It's just a formality.”

The old game, Marushka thought. One's the villain, the other's friendly.

The small man searched everywhere, even in cupboards. Finally he came to the wardrobe where Hans kept his clothes. “To whom do these belong?” he asked triumphantly.

“If you know so much about me, you must surely know that I gave birth to a child not so long ago,” Marushka said icily. “I can assure you that the child wasn't made by the Holy Ghost.”

“Then may we know who the father was?”

“Of course. His name is Eric Svensson. He is a Swede.”

While the men poked about the house Marushka tried to affect nonchalance while at the same time observing whether they looked with any suspicion at the couch. Twice the small man looked at it, then looked away.

In the kitchen the two men found a cache of coffee in Swedish bags, which Marushka had obtained from the church. The small man called to her. She came into the kitchen. “Where did you get this?” he demanded.

“I just told you that my boyfriend is a Swede.” Marushka looked at them mischievously. “I'd offer you a cup of coffee—but then you'd accuse me of bribery.”

The small man's face clouded. “Look here, Countess, don't be so smart. I can have you put into a concentration camp.”

“On what grounds?” Marushka demanded.

The older man stepped in now. “Please!” he said. “There's no point in arguments. We're just doing our job.” He smiled at her as though he was a priest and she was a penitent. “If you've done anything you shouldn't have, won't you relieve your conscience?”

This time Marushka could not suppress her laugh.

For more than an hour the two men went over and over every item in the small flat. The small man kept returning to the middle room to look at the couch. At last he went over and sat on it, and said, “How do I know someone isn't in there?”

Marushka held up her palms once more. “You're welcome to look.”

The small man pulled aside the cushions and tried to pry open the top. When he couldn't budge it he said, “Please open it up.”

“I don't believe it opens,” Marushka said. “I've only had the piece three weeks. I bought it when my other furniture was destroyed. I tried to open it, and I can't.”

“I don't believe you. Someone could easily be hiding in there.”

“
Oh!”
Marushka shouted. “Enough! I'm tired of this. I have work to do. You think there's someone in the couch, there's one way you can find out. I'm sure you have a gun. Take your gun and shoot through the couch. But you had better understand one thing:
You
pay for the fabric and repairs to put it back in shape.”

The small man hesitated, obviously flustered.

“Go on! Shoot! And then get out! I haven't got all day!”

They glared at each other. Marushka stared him down. He turned away. “Ah!” he said. “I still don't believe you.” Then he stalked from the flat. The older man followed.

For the next ten minutes Marushka sat, trying to calm herself. She did not try to speak to Hans, nor he to her. When she heard a knock on the back door she almost jumped from the seat. It was a Jewish girl wanting a counterfeit residence permit. “Go away,” Marushka whispered. “The Gestapo's just been here.” The girl's eyes opened to twice their normal size. In a second she was gone.

Half an hour later Marushka heard Hans unlatch the lid. She had to help him from the couch.

26

W
ILLY
G
LASER
had gone to Tempelhof after his escape from the Grosse Hamburger Strasse detention center in the hope of finding a Gentile boyhood friend. He had met Gilbert Mach when he was seventeen and they had served as extras at the opera. Neither had money, but both loved music, so being extras had solved their problem. When they were not performing they would attend the opera together, sitting in the highest, cheapest seats. They had one other passion in common: both had been fervent Social Democrats in the time before Hitler. On his birthday in 1924 Willy had received a biography of Beethoven from Mach. In the flyleaf Mach had written: “All men shall become brothers. This be our highest goal.” Surely now Mach would redeem that pledge, Willy thought as he rode the S-Bahn to Tempelhof.

But Mach, a producer of fruit juices, was away on a business trip. Willy had so counted on his presence that he was momentarily paralyzed by the news. When he recovered he went to the store of a grocer he knew and slipped in the back. The grocer told him that a man from the Gestapo had been in to inquire about him and was this very moment standing across the street. Apparently someone eager to get in favor with the Gestapo had supplied the police with a list of all Willy's non-Jewish friends. The grocer begged Willy to leave, and he did.

That night he slept in the woods. The next morning he walked the streets. He was without money and had not eaten since the previous morning. He stood in front of a bakery and inhaled the aroma of baking bread. When he was certain that no one was looking he picked cigarette butts off the sidwalks and smoked them until they burned his fingers. That night he slept again in the woods.

The next day Gilbert Mach returned to Tempelhof and took charge of Willy's life. He could not take Willy in because there was no way to hide his presence from the neighbors, but he managed to find Willy a place to stay. He also, miraculously, found Willy a job as a glazier, mending some of the thousands of windows that were being broken daily in the bombings.

Mach seemed to be without fear. Willy was not the only Jew he was helping. Nor was his help confined to Jews. For a while he had sheltered a woman whose husband had been executed by the Nazis for Communist activities. Mach did not even try to disguise his contempt for the Nazis. “Heil Hitler,” the mailman would say to him each morning. “Good morning,” Mach would reply.

Mach instructed Willy to maintain his appearance as well as he could in order to avoid attracting attention. That was not an easy job. The suit Willy wore was his only one; the material was shiny and thin. Because he had lost so much weight he was hard pressed to keep his pants up. His shoes were scuffed, the soles worn through. Nonetheless he tried. Wherever he went he carried a small briefcase with shaving equipment. On the days when he did not have a lodging he would shave in train stations. The risk of walking about unshaven was greater than the risk of using the restrooms. Most nights Willy did have a place to stay, but occasionally he would have to sleep in the woods, and so he also carried a small blanket in his briefcase.

On his first day off Willy took a train to the center of Berlin and went to the Philharmonic. He stood in the front hall, near the ticket windows, and scanned the seating charts as though he was choosing a place, all the while listening to the orchestra rehearse as he kept an eye out for guards. The music thrilled him.

The next morning Willy walked to work. Half a block from his destination he stopped in dismay. Where the glazier's shop had been there now lay a pile of rubble.

Only a handful of Jews had been in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse building on November 17, 1943, when Fritz Croner was picked up and brought there. The story was that a transport had left with fifty Jews just a few days earlier. Each day thereafter one or two more Jews arrived. As soon as another fifty were collected, they too would be put on a transport and shipped to the east. The word was that they would travel in a boxcar with straw on the floor; they would eat and sleep and dispose of their wastes in this boxcar, not leaving it until they arrived in Auschwitz. What happened after that was a source of endless debate. Many of the prisoners insisted that they would be put to some kind of forced labor, but others passed along the rumors that the Jews were being gassed.

In the first days of Fritz's confinement all of the prisoners were locked up throughout the day. This precaution had been taken, it was said, because a Jew had escaped the day before the last shipment was to leave, creating consternation among the guards. Exercise periods in the cemetery behind the building had been banned. After a week, however, the prisoners were permitted to mingle with one another in the corridors.

It struck Fritz that he was meeting the kind of Jews with whom he had never had dealings before. Except for his time on the railroad, his own life had been spent with middle- and upper-class Jews—professionals, merchants. His companions now were almost all working-class Jews. Conversation was not a problem, though; they had their common plight to discuss.

Each of them had a story, which he desperately wanted to share. There was the shoemaker of approximately thirty-five years, a diminutive man with red hair and a self-consciousness about his lack of education. His parents, who were Polish, had lived in Berlin since before World War I. They had had a difficult time. Germans disliked Poles to begin with; to be Polish
and
Jewish was to invite multiples of contempt. The thought of Auschwitz terrified the shoemaker. Each day he sought out Fritz, not to talk—because he had nothing more to say—but simply to be near him, which he found comforting. One day, as they sat alone in the hallway, the shoemaker leaned close to Fritz and whispered, “I have ten one-hundred-dollar bills in my left shoe and two diamonds in my right shoe. They are sewn into the soles. I put them there because I was sure they wouldn't take our shoes.” He hesitated. “If something happens to me, I want you to take my shoes.” Where the shoemaker had obtained the dollars Fritz never learned, but he was deeply touched by the offer.

In the hall one day Fritz noticed a woman of forty whom he hadn't seen before. He surmised that she had been captured the previous day. She was crying. He didn't approach her. When he returned, she hadn't moved, and she was still crying. He walked up to her and tried to console her, but what she told him then threw his own-feelings into a turmoil. She had been living in the underground with her niece. Her niece had been picked up; the Gestapo had told her that she could go free if she would turn in two other Jews. She had turned in her aunt and another woman, a family friend. “My own niece,” the aunt sobbed.

Oh, God, Fritz thought, what has become of our people?

And then came a man who had escaped from Auschwitz. His arrival electrified the prisoners. Fritz judged him to be forty, but he was only twenty-five. He was six feet tall, with dark hair and a face that remained handsome in spite of his almost skeletal appearance. From his features Fritz would never have guessed that he was Jewish. He told Fritz that he had escaped while on a work detail outside the camp. A Polish farmer had given him some clothes and burned his prison garb. Traveling only at night, he had made it back to Berlin in three weeks. Berlin had been his city, and he had thought that he could hide there. But all of his family was gone now, and he had been unable to find any of his friends. Without money, without a place to stay, he had had no alternative but to wander the streets. Inevitably he had been challenged by soldiers who patrolled the streets looking for deserters. And now here he was, on his way back to Auschwitz.