The Last Jews in Berlin (3 page)

But what had gone before was as nothing compared to the persecutions that began the moment Hitler became Chancellor on January 30. What surprised Fritz so much was the resentment that underlay the acts. They were motivated not by policy but by jealousy of Willy Croner's wealth and his son's popularity with the prettiest Gentile girls. Still, these people baring their hostility were not from the society in which the Croners had moved; they were the little people now suddenly able to hit back at those in the town whose success had festered in their minds.

A favorite target of the Nazis' persecutions was a thirty-year-old Jew named Salinger, who stood six feet six inches tall; it seemed to give them special satisfaction to humble a man so big. Early in February, Salinger was sent to a concentration camp at Hammerstein, about twenty miles from Deutsch-Krone, along with a number of other Jews and several Communists. A few days later word came back that Salinger had died in the camp. His body was returned to his family; it was Willy Croner's duty, as an officer of the temple's burial society, to prepare Salinger for interment. It took only one look at the marks covering Salinger's body to know he had been beaten to death.

Even then Willy Croner would not listen to any talk of emigration. Salinger's death had shaken him badly, but he saw it as a single case and the work of hotheads just come to power. It was imperative now more than ever to see these Nazis for what they were—opportunists outside the German mainstream, hornets who would plant their stingers and die.

A national boycott of Jewish shops decreed by the Nazis on April 1 reinforced Willy Croner's conviction. It passed uneventfully in Deutsch-Krone. Party members assigned to stand in front of the stores and warn shoppers away felt awkward and embarrassed. The Jewish shop owners solved everyone's discomfort by closing their stores at noon.

For a year and a half now Fritz had been learning the textile business. But it seemed increasingly evident to him—if not to his father—that his chances of one day taking over the store were slim. He decided to learn another profession. Gold-smithing had always interested him. He began to make the simplest kind of jewelry and to learn the business end of the trade. He quickly realized that he was a better businessman than craftsman. By the end of 1933 he was making more and more trips to Berlin to trade in jewels. Within another year his time was almost equally divided between Deutsch-Krone, where he helped his parents with the business, and Berlin, developing his new contacts.

Each time he returned to Deutsch-Krone he found it more difficult to maintain his old relationships with non-Jewish friends. One day, walking on the street, he saw a friend named Hans Beckmann with whom he had gone through school. Beckmann was wearing the uniform of a Wehrmacht officer. Thinking he would spare his friend the difficulty of having to deal with him in public, Fritz looked the other way. But Beckmann hailed him.

“Aren't you asking for trouble?” Fritz said when Beckmann came up to him.

“I really don't care,” Beckmann said. “I'm glad to see you. I want to talk to you. I'm doing this deliberately. It's my way of advertising that I don't accept the strictures against the Jews.”

But that encounter, in 1937, was the only offer of moral support Fritz received.

Almost ten years had passed since the Nazi seizure of power had tapped a reservoir of ill will against the Jews. The family store had been taken and the family pushed from Deutsch-Krone, and no Gentile friends had come forward to protest. Fritz's father, Willy, was now making gun barrels in a Berlin munitions factory, and Fritz was working on a railroad gang at forced labor for a few pennies an hour. The malevolence of the early years of Nazi power was, in retrospect, mere practice for the horrors that had since transpired. The horror of horrors had been “Crystal Night,” the night of November 9–10, when Nazis throughout Germany had arisen in retaliation against the Jews for the murder, in Paris, of a young German diplomat by a Polish-German Jew.

In Berlin, Fritz had watched the Nazis burn the synagogues, rip the Torah scrolls and plunder the Torah silver, smash windows and loot the Jewish shops, feeling completely detached from what he was witnessing, as though it was an aberration that had nothing to do with him. He was German and rational; what he was watching was not German, because it wasn't rational—Polish or Russian, perhaps, because Poland and Russia had had pogroms, but not German, because there had been no pogroms in Germany, where law and order prevailed.

Fritz's feeling that he was not part of what he was seeing held through the next day as the looting continued and police arrested thousands of Jewish men—a warning, in the wake of the shooting in Paris, that no Jew should ever again touch a German—and Fritz received word of what had transpired in Deutsch-Krone. Had he been there instead of in Berlin, he would surely be dead, because a gang of young men had marched to the Croner home, not knowing it had been confiscated, intent on seizing Fritz and stringing him up on a gallows they had constructed especially for him—the final act of retribution against the richest young man in town.

Fritz had been determined never to leave Germany, but to stand and fight instead, because Germany was his as much as it was anyone's, and if he left it to the rabble, there would be no Germany left. But this was no longer his Germany, and so, one day late in 1938, he had gone to the Aliyah office for emigration to Palestine and filed his application, along with one for Marlitt. Several times a week he would join the crowds at the Meinekestrasse office to see how his visa was coming. The signs were promising. Finally the Croners' applications were' approved. Fritz had already deposited several thousand dollars in a bank in Amsterdam in anticipation of their emigration. Now he and Marlitt packed their clothes and shipped them to Palestine, along with his motorcycle and some furniture.

On March 20, 1939, the Croners received notice to be at the depot that evening to take a train to Marseilles, where they were to board an illegal transport. But two hours later another caller advised them that there was no place for them on this transport after all. They would receive word of a new passage within a few days. Fritz and Marlitt rushed to the Palestine office to protest. They pointed out that they had already shipped their possessions and were almost without funds. Each day they were told to return the following day. Finally Fritz bluffed; he said that he had no more money. The bluff didn't work; the office refunded his passage money. They were off the lists.

Fritz and Marlitt suspected that the officials at the Palestine office had been putting their own relatives and friends on the ships. Nonetheless they told each other, “It's happening for the best.” In truth, they had not wanted to emigrate. In spite of everything, they still felt German. They felt that somehow they would get along.

How wrong they had been, they now knew. On September 1, 1941, the Nazis had ordered all Jews older than six to wear a Star of David over their hearts as of September 19. It was a yellow star outlined in black and embroidered with the word
Jude
. Jews had been crammed together into apartments, sometimes more than twenty to a room. They were forbidden to leave their districts without permission or to be outdoors after evening curfew hours—policies whose underlying purpose became clear once the deportations began. Not only had the Jewish cattle been branded for easy identification, they had been penned into stockades where their captors could cut them out of the herd for the trip to the slaughterhouse.

In January 1942, Jews were ordered to surrender all their winter coats, warm clothing and blankets, which were then shipped to German troops at the Russian front. By early 1942 all Jewish households were required to post Stars of David on their doors. Jews were banned from public streets on which government buildings were located, as well as from the great shopping streets such as the Kurfürstendamm. Jews could not ride public transportation, except under special circumstances, or use public rest rooms. They could not use public telephones. They were restricted to certain yellow benches in the parks, and eventually barred from the parks altogether. On May 15, 1942, Jews were ordered to surrender their pets. Soon thereafter they were deprived of all electric appliances, cameras, typewriters, bicycles and other objects of convenience. And in July blind and deaf Jews were ordered to cease wearing armlets identifying them as handicapped. Jews had to give up their telephones and radios and could not buy newspapers or periodicals. Jewish children had long since been banned from German schools; now Jewish schools were closed and Jewish children prohibited from taking private classes. Jews were no longer permitted to purchase tobacco, nor were they permitted to buy milk, eggs, fish, smoked meats, cheese, spirits or—if by some miracle they could scrape up the money—such delicacies as cake or even white bread. The list kept expanding until all that was left for the Jews were potatoes, coarse black bread—less than one pound per week, a fifth of that allotted to non-Jews—cabbage and beets, and not a good selection at that, because they could shop only between four and five in the afternoon after the food had been well picked over.

To nourish his baby daughter, Lane, born to him and Marlitt in 1941, Fritz Croner was paying a fortune for black market food. Staying alive in Berlin had become an all-consuming, day-to-day struggle, but that was as nothing compared to the prospect of deportation. Neighbors and fellow workers had already gone; their own turn could come any day.

It was a set of circumstances that had already broken the spirit of thousands of Jews and driven many of them to suicide. But, miraculously, Fritz Croner still possessed those same qualities that in the early days had helped him stare down the Nazis: toughness, resilience, an almost sublime sense of his ability to survive. He knew that one day his family would have to go underground. “To live in the underground you have to have money, money, money—and connections,” he would say. And so he had acquired both. In spite of the improbable odds, he had managed—in the few hours left to him each day after his forced labor at the railroad yard—to carry on a thriving trade in precious stones and had already accumulated cash and jewelry.

He had many clients. As German currency continued to lose its value, the value of jewelry rose. People who had never owned jewelry now bought it. Much of the buying was done in the larger stores, but those stores relied on go-betweens such as Fritz Croner to keep them supplied with merchandise. A large store would ask him if he could find a good one-karat stone. He would comb the smaller stores and the wares of private gem dealers until he found what he wanted at a good price. Then he would sell the stone to the larger store. In this manner he could earn hundreds of marks—sometimes in a single day. There were days when he walked the streets with five thousand dollars' worth of jewelry in his pockets.

Not even the order to wear Jewish stars on their clothes starting September 19, 1941, put a crimp in Fritz's business. Marlitt pinned the stars to their clothes; they would wear the stars when they walked the streets of their neighborhood, but remove them as soon as they left its boundaries. What they were doing was strictly illegal, and they knew it, but they had made plans for any challenge.

One day in December 1941 a policeman appeared at their apartment. He said that an anonymous informant had denounced both of them for failing to wear their stars.

“Your informant doesn't know what he's talking about,” Fritz said. “Here, look.” He showed the policeman two coats on which Marlitt had securely sewn the stars—and which they always left on hooks by the door. The policeman tugged at the stars, shrugged and departed. The Croners never saw him again.

But it was episodes like these that made Fritz realize that going underground was inevitable. He was sure that events would tell him when the day was at hand. On the morning of December 3, 1942, he went as usual to his job at the railroad yard; there two Jewish colleagues showed him notices they had received from the Jewish community headquarters ordering them to remain at home that day for “statistical reasons.” The only statistical reasons Fritz could imagine would be those supplied by the Gestapo, which, periodically since October 1941, had required the Jewish community to supply a specified number of Jews for “resettlement.”

Fritz said nothing to his fellow workers. He watched them present their notices to the foreman, who excused them to go home. Then he approached the foreman. “I received the same notice,” he said. His bluff worked; the foreman didn't ask to see the notice. Instead, with a nod and a wave and what Fritz suspected was a knowing look, he excused him for the day.

Two hours after he had left for work Fritz was back home. Marlitt had just put Lane down for her nap. At the sight of her husband she paled.

“It's time,” he said simply.

Marlitt nodded. Then she immediately began to hide clothing and provisions for Lane in the baby carriage. Their own clothing would be left behind. The only possessions they would take with them were the jewels Fritz had guarded for this moment. These too would be hidden in the baby's carriage.

The next problem to solve concerned Fritz's family. (Marlitt's father and two sisters had managed to emigrate to Shanghai several years before.) Fritz sent word to his parents and his uncle, his mother's brother, to come to his apartment at seven o'clock that evening, an hour before the curfew for Jews. Then he set out for the apartment of a Frau Kosimer, a woman of seventy he had met through a stateless Russian-born jeweler named Makarow. The distance was less than a mile, normally a pleasant ten-minute walk along tree-lined streets whose buildings had not yet been hit by the bombs. Today Fritz felt as if he could make the journey in less than half that time. But while anxiety urged him on, prudence restrained his gait. He knew that his behavior mustn't seem abnormal to anyone who observed him.

Frau Kosimer was a widow who had been living in Berlin since 1938. Her husband, a Jew, had been killed when the Germans occupied Austria in March of that year. She had moved to Berlin to be near her best friend. The authorization she brought with her noted that she was Catholic, and accordingly her resettlement was accepted without question.