The Last Jews in Berlin (36 page)

“Just a moment. Who are you? And what is it?”

“My name is Hammerschmidt. I've just escaped from the Gestapo.”

At that, Marushka all but pulled the young man inside. When he had recovered his breath he told his story. A half Jew, he'd been apprehended by the Gestapo several days before and taken to Oranienburg, a detention center in the north of Berlin. There the Gestapo had offered to barter with him—his freedom for the names of ten Jews. “I have some names in my apartment,” Hammerschmidt said.

“What happened then?” Marushka demanded.

“They took me to the flat. I asked to go to the toilet. Then I escaped through the window.”

“Let's pray you weren't followed,” Marushka said.

“I'm sure I wasn't. I hid for two hours before coming here.”

Marushka sighed. “Didn't it occur to you that the Gestapo might have let you escape in order to see where you'd go?”

Hammerschmidt shut his eyes. The idea was not something he could handle. “Come on,” Marushka said. As she helped him up she noticed how hot he felt. “You've got a fever,” she told him.

The next morning she took his temperature. It was 105. Marushka instructed Hans to keep giving Hammerschmidt liquids, and she gave him a sulfa drug. But when she returned at noon to look in on him, Hammerschmidt was worse.

“I'm not sure this boy is going to make it,” Marushka told the others in the living room. “What do we do if he dies?”

“We'll put him in a sack and throw him in the park,” Tamara proposed.

“I'm afraid that's not very practical,” Marushka said.

That afternoon Marushka called on a doctor who was so old he would have long since retired if there hadn't been a war. The doctor was a friend of a veterinary surgeon with whom she worked. She wasn't positive she could trust him, but she had to take a chance. That evening the doctor examined Hammerschmidt, diagnosed a lung inflammation and prescribed a medication. The next morning Hammerschmidt was better. Within a week he was eating such an alarming amount of food that Marushka searched hard for a place to send him. As soon as she found one, he left.

A few days later there was another visitor, a tall man with dark hair, wearing a messy-looking suit. He'd escaped from Oranienburg, he told Marushka as they faced one another in the living room.

“What gave you the idea to come to my flat?” Marushka asked him. As she spoke she edged her way behind her writing table, hoping to grab her gun through a hole in the drawer.

But the tall man read her mind. “Don't do that,” he warned. Then he told her that he had both her address and the church's. When the church couldn't help him, he had come to her flat.

“Well, if you're staying here, I'd better get you something to eat,” Marushka said. She summoned Tamara and instructed her to go to the church and, in addition to getting some food, find out if the man had been there.

While Tamara was gone the man explained his escape. He'd been detailed to clean up a batch of S.S. uniforms, had stolen one and walked out of the camp. Then Tamara returned with word that a man had been to the church that day who fitted this man's description. As the man ate his food Marushka begged him to leave. “You're in deadly danger here,” she said. “The Gestapo patrols this street every half hour. If you're caught in here, it doesn't mean just your death but mine and everyone else's.” He agreed to leave if he could have some food to take with him. Later that night Marushka led him through a series of connecting cellars to an exit down the street. “For God's sake,” she exploded when she returned, “from now on we don't open that door to anyone we don't know.”

But the next person to come through the door was a good friend, Werner Keller, the former pilot, who now worked for Albert Speer, and what he brought with him was infinitely more upsetting than the presence of the most difficult stranger. It was word that the Maltzan family estate in Silesia had been taken by the Russians. This time Marushka could not restrain her emotions; she threw herself on the couch and cried until it did not seem possible that her body could manufacture more tears. Despite her estrangement from her brother and difficulties with her sisters, she had always felt rooted to that expanse of Silesian soil. That was where she had walked as a child with her father, examining the chestnut trees he had planted on the birth of each of his children. She had known every tree, every culvert, every brook; she had been nurtured, she believed, not so much by her mother as by the earth of this estate. Now it was gone forever.

The children watched in silence, not really understanding how or why their own Russians had caused Marushka so much grief. Hans could understand it, but he was not able to do much about it. He was certain it would do no good to point out that she had always known it would happen; this was not an event that submitted to any rational analysis.

At last Marushka stopped crying. But then she began to pace back and forth in the small living room, the Scotch terriers pacing behind her. For more than an hour she paced, the dogs always at her heel, until Hans said at last, “Please sit down.” Words unspoken were conveyed in that remark: that this was land lost, after all, not lives; that there were more significant losses to mourn; that she, at least, had not had a mother exterminated by the Nazis. Marushka knew exactly what was implied, but she had neither the heart nor the strength to reply.

The next day a friend, Gregor Zivier, did it for her. He had come to console her after learning the news. It would have been evident even to a stranger that Hans and Marushka were at odds, but Zivier knew them so well he could also divine the problem. “Hans,” he said, “it's not only the Jews. The Germans are suffering too. People are at the front who didn't want this war. Their families are being bombed. You can't suppose that one side is suffering and the other side has a lovely life. Marushka has lost family too. You're not well, but look at her. She looks like death.”

They sat in silence then, unable to continue, knowing that this was an argument without a winning side.

39

T
HE THREE MONTHS
since Erik Perwe's death had been a time of almost unbearable pain and strain for Erik Myrgren as he awakened to the realities of Nazi genocide and his own responsibilities to oppose it. Even the stories told him by the distraught Jews who had stolen into the church through back alleys or during the air raids or under cover of darkness had scarcely prepared him for what he was subsequently to learn about the church's involvement in the labyrinth of clandestine work.

The young pastor of the Swedish church in Berlin had not come by the knowledge automatically. Only Erik Wesslen, the church's go-between with helpful Gestapo contacts, knew the entire story, and Wesslen's first response to Myrgren had not been open at all. He liked the young folk-singing priest well enough as a lively addition to the staff, but taking him on as a partner in the game of life and death he played each day was another matter. In Perwe, Wesslen had had a tested ally with the commitment, poise and experience to carry off his masquerade. In Myrgren he sensed a youthful, joyous spirit that had not yet been tempered by the realities of Nazi Germany, a mind that despite the accumulating evidence, still resisted the idea that such bestiality could exist in modern times. His capacity for discretion, his stamina and resources, his reserves of courage, his commitment to helping others, even his abilities and intelligence—all of these were unknowns. More than that, his knowledge of the operation was nil. Small wonder that in the days after Perwe's death Wesslen was upset and wary, and reluctant to impart secret knowledge to his successor.

And yet he would have to do it. Erik Myrgren, scarcely out of the seminary, was now the titular head of the parish, through whose authority—and only through whose authority—the operation could continue, because he controlled the supplies on which the operation existed. Those supplies were the coin of Wesslen's barter with his contacts in the Gestapo; they could not be dispensed without the parish priest's approval.

Wesslen watched Myrgren closely in those first bewildering days after news of the crash had reached them, and was, perversely, encouraged by what he saw. Myrgren's flashing smile almost vanished. The sparkle dimmed in his eyes. As he shouldered the sorrows of more and more Jews, he seemed, like a weight lifter, to gain muscle under those added burdens.

Personal factors too worked to gain Wesslen's trust. Myrgren was much closer to Wesslen's age than Perwe had been; for both young Swedes the responsibility that fell to them seemed more awesome and intoxicating than it might for older, more seasoned men. Then too their memories of Sweden were those of contemporaries. And they shared a mutual passion for botany which they indulged when they could—Myrgren, the frustrated naturalist, Wesslen, the would-be landscape architect, whose studies had initially brought him to Berlin. Together they marveled at the innate grace and natural beauty of the city that somehow survived the bombings, the lakes and parks and forests with their thick stands of birch trees so reminiscent of home. Such comparisons would catch them off guard, provoking sighs and silence and far-off looks.

But talk of home and plant life and the problems of young men was reserved—once Myrgren had gained Wesslen's trust—for their rare, precious moments of repose. What they spoke about at their meetings in the church each morning was far more serious—the art of exchanging goods for lives.

Wesslen taught Myrgren everything that Erik Perwe had known. The young pastor learned how to swap liquor and money—both of which the church seemed to have in abundance for this work—for such provisions as gas and coal, which were needed if the church was to continue to operate. He learned how to obtain ration cards and false documents for the illegals. Using the records of Swedes born of Swedish parents in Berlin, Myrgren could literally create a past for an illegal. A Jewish woman of thirty-five came to him one day in the second month of his tenure, clearly exhausted from hiding herself for almost two years, and with no place to hide any longer. “Can't you counterfeit some kind of identity for me?” she begged.

“Oh, yes,” Myrgren replied. He searched the church's baptismal records for a girl born of Swedish parents thirty-five years before. Then he made certain that neither the child nor her parents were still in Berlin. Finally he wrote out an attestation, using all the details of the former residents' histories. The woman promptly took the attestation to a district in which all records had been destroyed and received a new identity card.

Part of Myrgren's education was in learning to determine which of the persons coming to him for help were Jews and which were Gestapo plants. As a student of the Old Testament he knew an enormous amount not only about the history of the Jews but about Jewish religious practices. He was able to use this knowledge to excellent advantage. First he would ask the petitioners routine questions, such as where they were born, what their parents' names had been, and whether they practiced Judaism. Then he would ease into some simple questions about Jewish history.

One day Myrgren received a visit from a tall light-haired man who said he was an underground Jew but whom Myrgren immediately suspected of being a Gestapo agent. For fifteen minutes the pastor questioned the visitor. It was obvious from his answers that he wasn't a Jew.

“Why are you here?” the pastor asked at last.

The visitor said he had come looking for a friend; the name he gave was one Myrgren had never heard before. “I don't know him,” he said.

“May I stay a while? Perhaps he'll appear.”

“No, he won't. And you may not.”

Much of Myrgren's knowledge of Hitler's Germany was acquired through his contact with its suffering victims. But the most graphic lesson of all came one evening at Christmas time and was delivered by a German visitor.

He came in late and unannounced, a man of fifty, with a matter-of-fact manner. He said that he had been a friend of Erik Perwe's. He owned a factory that manufactured brushes. He had many Jews working in the factory under false identities, he confided. All of them were blind. Then he came to the purpose of his visit. He told the young pastor that he had been asked to bid on a contract to provide brushes for a number of concentration camps. Not being familiar with the needs of the camps, he had asked the authorities for permission to visit them. The permission was granted, but when he got to the camps he had to content himself with interviews with the people in charge. He was never permitted to inspect the facilities. Finally at one camp he became acquainted with a garrulous sergeant, who told him what was happening. Jews were being gassed to death. Their teeth were then extracted and heated to melt out the gold. Their bones were ground for fertilizer, and their fat was converted to soap. The factory processing the bodies used up more than two hundred Jews a day, the sergeant said.

For several minutes after he had told his story the brush manufacturer sat in silence with the Swedish minister.

“Why are you telling me? What do you want me to do?” Myrgren said at last.

“I would like you to spread the word that this is happening,” the brush manufacturer said. “I would like you to get word to Sweden. Perhaps if you can tell someone, the facts will be publicized.” He paused for a moment. “For whatever you can do, I thank you,” he said. The he rose and left.

Myrgren did not get up. He was not certain that he could. He felt pressed against his chair by an enormous weight. He knew that a part of his life had just ended.

Half an hour passed before he forced himself from the chair. Time to start, he thought. He went into the hall to look for Wesslen. He would tell Wesslen the story. And then, between them, they would have to come up with a way to move more Jews to Sweden.

For months now, persons with any claim to Swedish identity had been petitioning the Swedish legation for evacuation to Sweden. Few of them had the necessary papers, but members of the legation staff were more than willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They began to issue emergency passports without the legation minister's knowledge. It was only one step further to issue provisional passports to German Jews—some known personally to them, others vouched for by Erik Myrgren and Erik Wesslen—and to send these Jews, one by one, along with the Swedish-Germans, to Lübeck, where, if all went well, they would board a ship for Sweden. But the risk of discovery was great; the Nazis made random checks on the passports, and the process was maddeningly slow. Myrgren, with Wesslen's help, kept searching for opportunities to send a group of Jews out at once.