The Last Jews in Berlin (32 page)

What happened next did not seem real. The man in front took out an identification and showed it to her and said, “We are from the Gestapo.” But he was a nice-looking man in his middle thirties and he was smiling pleasantly at her, and as she passed him and his partner through the gate and led them up the path, wondering if she would make it to the door, it registered on her that in all the times she had imagined how it might happen, she had never envisioned a pleasant smile on the face of her captor.

The pleasant-looking man told his partner to wait outside. Then he took Hella by the arm and led her to the kitchen. “You look a little faint,” he said solicitously. “Perhaps you should take some brandy.”

“There's a tenant asleep in the next room,” Hella said weakly as they entered the kitchen.

He closed the door. “No one need hear our business,” he said. Even as he began to speak the words Hella had prayed she would never hear he still smiled pleasantly, almost appreciatively at her.

“Are you the mistress of this house?”

“I am.”

“May I see your papers, please?”

Hella fetched her one piece of identity, the pregnancy priority card with her picture and Kadi's name on it. She gave it to the Gestapo agent, who stared at her shaking hand for a moment and then smiled at her again. Then he studied the card and nodded and said, “And where is Herr Wirkus?”

“He is in Marienbad, on convalescent leave, to receive treatments for his elbow.” As Hella spoke she put an arm on the table to support herself, and prayed that Kurt would not awaken and call out, “Hella, what's the matter?” Or that Ursula would not come into the kitchen and say, “Guten Tag, Frau Riede.” Or that Mrs. Jerneitzig and the children would not begin to make noises upstairs.

“You have been denounced for harboring a Jewish couple,” the Gestapo agent said.

“I can't understand that,” Hella said. “There are no Jews here.” Each word passed through her dry throat like a rasp.

“Have you ever had a couple living here with you?”

“Yes. There was a couple. We met them in a cafe. They told us they had been bombed out of their flat in Berlin. We took them in for several days because we pitied them, but then they left and we haven't seen them since.” Hella bit her lip, playing the part. “It was really my idea. I hope this won't get my husband into trouble at his office.”

The Gestapo agent smiled again. “How long is it since they were here?”

“A month at least.”

“I see,” the Gestapo agent said. His smile now was the kind a man gives a woman when he wishes to communicate his interest, and yet when he put his hand on her arm and gave it a gentle squeeze, what he seemed to be communicating more than anything was reassurance. “I want you to tell your story to my partner, so that he can write out a report.” He paused and looked into her eyes. “Are you sure you wouldn't like a little brandy?” he said then.

“No. Just let me excuse myself for a moment.” She left the kitchen and went to the pump and held onto it for a moment and then let cold water pour over her wrists. When she came back to the kitchen, the agent led her outside and told her to repeat the story. Several times during the narration he prompted her, so that the story became even more emphatic than when she had told it to him. There was no doubt now, the Gestapo agent was helping her. If only Kurt would remain asleep! If only Ursula and the Jerneitzigs would remain in their rooms.

The second agent closed his notebook and put his pen away. The two men started down the path. “Auf Wiedersehen,” Hella said.

The first agent turned around and smiled at her in that same warm and solicitous manner. “Better not ‘auf Wiedersehen,'” he said. He turned then, and they left.

For a long moment Hella stood, unable to move, not simply from fright but from astonishment. What the agent had just said made it clear that he knew. He had said in effect, “Let's hope we don't meet again.”

In Marienbad several days later Beppo was returning from the baths when the hotel manager rushed up to him. “Your wife fainted a few minutes ago. She's upstairs in bed.”

Beppo vaulted the steps to the room. Kadi, her skin chalky, her lips trembling, handed him Kurt's letter, detailing the Gestapo's visit. The letter also informed them that the Riedes had cleared out that day, that they had had to tell Ursula the truth to impress on her that she must stay and feed the chickens, that they had gone to sit in an S-Bahn for several hours, and that finally they had gone in desperation to the hiding place of another illegal Jew, Willy Katz, with whom Kurt had worked at the baron's leather warehouse, and that after Hella had gotten down on her knees and begged, the Katzes had agreed to take them in, but only for a few days.

Now that the charade had ended, the dam that Kadi had erected within herself to hold back her fears gave way, and fright flooded her body. “We've got to get out of here,” she said to Beppo. “They'll find us and kill us.”

“No. We'll stay,” Beppo said. “If the Gestapo is going to get us, they'll get us wherever we are.”

33

E
VERY DAY
of his confinement in Frau Jauch's five-by-six-foot tool shed Hans Rosenthal had a visitor, some member of one of the three antifascist families in the neighborhood that knew of his existence and helped Frau Jauch sustain him. The visitor would bring a few potatoes or a turnip or a piece of bread, exchange a few whispered words with Hans, and then slip out through the cottage and the store to the street. And there were occasional visits from Grandmother Agnes, who brought food, but because she was there ostensibly to do business with Frau Jauch, she couldn't linger either. Such news as she had she gave him in whispers. Once she started to tell him about his cousin Ruth Thomas, who had also gone underground, but Hans stopped her. If he was captured and tortured, the less he knew the better.

So it was that during the fifteen months of his confinement Hans really had only Frau Jauch to speak to. A less likely soul mate for a young man of eighteen could scarcely be imagined. Her contribution to the brief conversation they had each evening in hushed voices had not changed from what it had been at the outset of his confinement fifteen months before—interpretations of events and prophecies of the future based on her reading of the Bible. Hans would nod agreeably to whatever statement she made, but he was scarcely willing to attribute his survival to Scriptural divination.

When he had first come to Frau Jauch's in March of 1943 Hans had expected his confinement to last no more than three or four months. Had he known he would still be in hiding fifteen months later he might not have been able to make it. Frau Jauch must have sensed his claustrophobic restlessness, because, in addition to trying to relieve it with a daily newspaper, she had brought him a primitive radio. At night he could listen to the Berlin broadcasts with the volume at its lowest and his ear pressed against the earphone. And then, early in 1944, she surprised him again with a more powerful and battery-operated model with which he could pick up the BBC in the early morning hours. The signal was very weak and frequently faded away, but each contact injected him with fresh hope.

In her quiet way this frail and tiny woman had managed to sustain him through his unimaginably lonely ordeal. Her existence was so basic to his survival it was as though they were connected by an umbilical cord, through which flowed not just nourishment but the resources by which he could maintain his sanity. Hans did not even want to think about what would happen to him if Frau Jauch were injured or killed in an air raid.

If Frau Jauch herself ever thought about what her presence meant to Hans, she never mentioned it or expressed it in nonverbal ways. Had she had a son, he would have been approximately Hans's age, but she was a spinster, without parental experience, and in spite of everything she had done for him, she had never directly or indirectly asked of him the affection due a mother.

In a way it was just as well. For a Jew in Germany—as Hans knew so well by now—affection was a decided risk. His parents were dead. His brother Gert had been deported to God knew what fate. One uncle had died in Buchenwald, the other at home after two weeks of Gestapo torture. So it was no good to love other people, because you wound up losing the objects of your love.

And then one night in July, Hans learned how effectively he had been fooling himself.

That night Frau Jauch was suddenly seized by violent pains in her lower abdomen. For the second time since he had arrived fifteen months earlier Hans left the vicinity of her house; he raced to the home of a neighbor he knew to be friendly. The neighbor called an ambulance and then accompanied Frau Jauch to the hospital. Twenty-four hours later Frau Jauch was dead of a ruptured hernia.

Hans was devastated. He knew then not only that Frau Jauch had become like a mother to him but that it was even more than a young son's love that he felt. For all this time she had been the sole target of his feelings. Her death, he recognized now, was like the loss of an entire family.

From a practical standpoint it was a calamity. There was no way he could continue to live in her house by himself without revealing his presence. Light, noise, odors—any of these could give him away. Moreover, there was no way he could get provisions. If he did not think of something, Hans concluded, he would simply have to turn himself in to the Gestapo. He had just one possibility, a woman two gardens removed from Frau Jauch's. Her husband was in Russia and her son was in the navy, and she lived in her cottage alone.

Marie Schönebeck had learned a few weeks before that Frau Jauch had a “nephew” living with her, so she was not surprised when Hans appeared. She was, however, astounded by his story, which he revealed to her in full detail. For a moment Hans read her astonishment as disapproval, and he died a little. But then Frau Schönebeck said, as firmly as she could, “You'll stay here.” Hans exploded with relief.

Frau Schönebeck passed the word to two trustworthy neighbors that she had taken Hans into hiding. Between those neighbors and Frau Jauch's antifascist friends they managed to collect enough food to feed Hans. But Hans's situation at Frau Schönebeck's was much more exposed, and thus more dangerous, than it had been at Frau Jauch's. During the day he stayed in Frau Schönebeck's bedroom. At night he moved into the living room and slept on the couch. Whenever visitors came he had to hide quickly. And he had to be certain that there were never two plates or two glasses on Frau Schönebeck's table.

For several weeks when the bombs fell Hans remained where he was while everyone else went to the shelters. One evening, however, a friendly neighbor pressed him to join the other neighbors in an air raid shelter they had built nearby, a crude excavation covered with logs, which in turn were covered with earth. Apprehensive, Hans refused. “Come on,” the neighbor said, “everyone in there already knows about you.”

The neighbor was so insistent that Hans finally succumbed. With trepidation he followed the neighbor to the shelter. When he stepped inside the shelter his fists were clenched. But when his eyes grew accustomed to the light he realized that all the others were smiling at him and nodding agreeably in greeting. They seemed not only willing to share their shelter but exceedingly happy to have him. Before long Hans understood why. The neighbors knew that Hans had been hiding in Frau Jauch's house when that bomb had demolished all the surrounding cottages. As long as the Jew who had saved Frau Jauch's home from destruction was with them, they knew they were safe from the bombs.

34

B
EFORE THE DEPARTURE
of the Wirkus family for Marienbad, Beppo Wirkus, ever precise, had left the particulars of their return with Kurt and Hella Riede. So when the Wirkuses returned to Berlin late in the evening of a cool June night the Riedes were at the Anhalter railway station to meet them. In spite of the shock he had felt on learning of the Gestapo visit, Beppo was struck once again by how well the Riedes blended into the crowd. Hella, with her blond braids, seemed the most typically German woman on the platform. And Kurt, with his thick glasses, was obviously exempt from military service. Still, Beppo could not help looking up and down the platform for S.S. patrols or Gestapo agents in their unmistakable fedoras.

Kurt quickly brought the Wirkuses up to date. The tiny gardener's house in Birkenwerder in which Willy Katz and his wife lived had proved to be too small. Katz had found them a new hiding place nearby, with a Gentile family. The Wirkuses agreed that they would come to visit the Riedes, provided they found on their return to Wittenau that there had been no further inquiries.

There had not been, Ursula told them. Nor, to Beppo's and Kadi's immense relief, did the Gestapo come for them, as they had feared would happen. Two days later the Wirkuses called on the Riedes. The two couples took a blanket and went to a nearby woods and sat in the shade. There Hella told them the story in detail.

Neither of the Riedes could imagine who had denounced them. They had concluded that a catcher must have spotted Hella, decided she looked suspicious, followed her home and reported her to the Gestapo.

“A ‘catcher?'” Kadi said.

And then Hella had to explain how the Gestapo was using Jews to catch other Jews, and how Jews often had an instinctive feeling about who were Jews and who weren't.

Then Hella and Kurt confessed that they were miserable in their new hiding place. Their host and his children were very nice to them, but his wife was hysterical with fear that the Riedes' presence would prove disastrous for her family. She had calmed down a bit a few days after their arrival, but then Hella had been seized with a bad attack of dysentery, and that had made the wife hysterical once more. Moreover, the family was charging them a fortune. The Riedes didn't say it in so many words, but they implied that if it were ever possible they would like to return to Wittenau.