The Last Jews in Berlin (6 page)

He never had far-reaching plans. Had he possessed the talent, he would have preferred a career in music. Had the world been a different place, he would have liked to open a travel agency, not for the money but for the opportunity to travel. There was one period of intense excitement for him, in the years after World War I, when Marxists were preaching revolution and change was in the air. “We worked six days a week,” he would recall, “even Saturdays, from eight to six. All of a sudden people were proposing that we work an eight-hour day, a five-day week. The boss had been second to God. All of a sudden people were proposing that we make committees and decide our own fate.”

It was a time of intense advocacy and democracy under the protection of the Weimar Republic, established after World War I, but it was a time enjoyed only by those with a taste for change and not by the great mass of Germans. They perceived the Republic as the bastard child of the victorious allies. They recoiled from the artistic and moral experiments that seemed to be carried on in accord with an adventuresome political spirit that ruled the day. They yearned for the authoritarianism that had characterized German life for as long as they could remember, and they looked upon those who had taken command of the government and the culture as an alien minority. That some of the ruling politicians and proponents of the fervid bohemian culture were Jews only served to persuade the majority of Germans of the correctness of biases against Jews that were as much a part of the Teutonic legacy as the music of Richard Wagner—himself a fanatical anti-Semite.

Nor did economic conditions ultimately help the cause of democracy under the Weimar Republic. In the early twenties ruinous inflation had destroyed the German mark and, with it, all forms of savings. The late twenties witnessed something of a recovery; Germany actually increased production in key sectors over prewar figures, and by 1930 was in the top rank of exporting countries. Increasing employment and gains by labor, many forced on industrialists by the government, had muted the cries of the Marxists, but the shocks felt in Germany from the Wall Street crash of 1929 gave a certain credence to their arguments that Germany was controlled by cartels and vulnerable to their problems. As the twenties ended, Germany slid into a depression so bad that one-third of the nation was dependent, either partly or wholly, on some form of public support.

By the time of elections in September 1930, government, industry, agriculture and labor were all at loggerheads, and German voters responded to this disorder by increasing the representation of the Nazi party in the Reichstag from 12 deputies to 107. In the process the government lost its majority—and its power to regulate industry. Production and wages plummeted and unemployment surged. The worse economic conditions became, the greater the Nazis' gains. By the end of 1932 the Weimar Republic and its democratic principles had lost all prospects, and by 1933, when Hitler came to power, Willy Glaser had lost all faith in the egalitarian dreams that had sustained him through the twenties.

His friends told Willy not to worry: bad management would quickly ruin Hitler; he would last a few months at most. Willy didn't believe them, but not wanting to draw attention to himself, he didn't argue. Later he got no satisfaction from the knowledge that he had been right. Under the Nazis the country experienced a dramatic economic resurgence, much of it a consequence of rearmament, paid for by taxes and “voluntary” contributions. The rearmament was in violation of the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I but that did not bother the average German a bit. Unemployment shrank—from six million in 1933 to one million in 1938. Workers' conditions improved dramatically, almost entirely as a consequence of the paternalism of the state; for a pittance they could now take vacations at lakes and spas and winter resorts. None of this helped Willy, of course. Every rise in the fortunes of “good Germans” seemed to be accompanied by added misfortunes for Jews. Jewish professors lost their positions, Jewish lawyers and doctors their practices. Jewish pupils were expelled from schools and universities. Jews were forbidden to commingle with “Aryans.” Jews were commanded to sell their businesses at a fraction of their value, to register their valuables and later to give them up. They were required to change their first names—the men to Israel, the women to Sarah. Their passports were stamped with a large red
J
.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Willy Glaser greeted the news with foreboding but also with relief. “This will take a bloody end,” he told himself, “because Hitler is insane. He is saying that the Jews started the war, and he is insane enough to believe it.”

Any hope that the German people, in whom he had once believed, would recoil from Germany's involvement in a new world war was quickly removed from Willy's mind. True, he saw no excitement or commitment to the war as he walked the streets of Berlin; if anything, he could have interpreted the look on Berliners' faces as a reluctance to be involved bordering on apprehension. But the only sign of the war, other than the many uniforms on the streets, was the constant news of its excellent progress. Berlin itself remained untouched. Its residents had no feeling for the war and felt no deprivation; to the contrary, their relative prosperity seemed supported by a sense of national purpose.

Willy could only reflect with bitterness on the increased wellbeing and sense of contentment that filled men with whom he'd once worked. He would have preferred to have remained a worker and not become an entrepreneur; only with the greatest reluctance had he started a small textile business in the mid-1980s, after the firm that had employed him was squeezed dry by the Nazis and he couldn't find other work. In 1941 even that small enterprise had to be abandoned when, at the age of forty-one, he was impressed into forced labor as a factory worker.

As Willy's conditions became worse and worse, a mood of increasing fatalism permeated his life. Replaying the past only deepened his conviction that his life had been charted onto some tragic course. His two brothers had emigrated in the mid-1930s, one to Israel, the other to Shanghai and then to the United States. He hadn't even tried to emigrate, because he doubted that he could interest any country in his case. What country would care to receive a middle-aged Jew with neither money nor talent? Moreover, one of the sons had to remain behind to look after their mother, who, now in her seventies, had decided to remain in Germany. He knew in his heart that he also wanted to stay, and so he had assigned himself the responsibility.

And then one morning in December 1942 Willy went to his mother's home and found her door was sealed. Whenever the Nazis emptied a house of its inhabitants prior to sending them to the east, they sealed the doors so that the furniture and other possessions could be confiscated in the name of the state and then sold at auction.

Willy's mother had been taken to a building on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse that had once been a home for elderly Jews but served now as a collecting station for those Jews about to be deported. Willy went immediately to find her, knowing he was risking his own deportation and believing that deportation meant liquidation in one form or another.

He saw his mother only briefly, the two of them speaking softly, holding hands but fighting back their tears. Neither wished to make it more difficult for the other. And then she was gone.

There comes a point when life is so unredeemed that great risks seem of no consequence. It was at this point that Wilhelm Glaser began his own small war against fate. His first act was to remove his star on his way to and from work. From his apartment house in Lichtenberg to his work in Weissensee was a distance of 6.5 kilometers. Jews were allowed to use public transportation only if the distance between home and work was at least 7.5 kilometers. His work hours were 6:00
A.M.
to 6:00
P.M.;
that meant he had to leave for work at 4:30
A.M.,
and would not return until 7:30
P.M.
The practical effect was that he had no time to shop for food and other necessities. And so Willy removed his star and rode the streetcars, knowing that discovery meant his own deportation. When he got off the streetcar he would duck into a doorway near his place of work—Warnecke and Boehm, a producer of paints, lacquers and oils—and pin the star back on. At the end of the day he would remove the star again for the journey home. Even the discovery of a star that was pinned on rather than sewn on meant deportation, he knew. He had seen S.S. plainclothesmen inspecting the stars of Jews on the Alexanderplatz and arresting those who failed to pass inspection. To Willy that was just one further essential risk.

Willy's home at the time was a furnished room in the first-floor apartment of a Jewish house. There was a small spy hole in the door, with a rag pinned behind it in lieu of glass. At night he would poke a pencil through the hole, push away the rag and peer inside. If no coats were hanging on the rack near the door, he would know that the people he had been living with had been picked up, and he would have to disappear.

On the night of January 31 Willy forgot to put his pencil through the peephole. He unlocked the door, stepped inside, and found himself before two big, hefty men in plain clothes.

“Is your name Glaser?” the older one said.

“Yes.”

“Pack your things and come along.”

When he had finished packing they took him to an apartment on the fourth floor. The apartment's occupants were no longer there. Willy surmised that they had already been picked up, but that one of them, like himself, had been late returning from work.

They waited through the night, but no one came. By 6:00
A.M.
the Gestapo men were ready to give up. “Let's go,” the older man said.

As they stepped outside the apartment Willy said to himself, “If God is on my side, something has to happen now. Once I'm in the car, I have no chance.”

The younger man turned to seal the door. Willy shoved the older man and bolted down the stairs. The older man raced after him, but Willy threw his suitcase at his legs. The man fell over the suitcase, bounced down the steps, banged into a wall and lay still. Panic struck Willy as he remembered that the entrance to the building might be locked, as it was from eight each evening until six the following morning. But he pulled at the door and it opened. God is with me, he thought. He raced into the street, a free man for as long as his legs could keep him ahead of his pursuers.

5

F
EBRUARY
27, 1943, had not been randomly chosen by the Nazis for the
Fabrik Aktion
, in which all of the Jews still involved in war production in Berlin were to be seized at their jobs and, together with their families, deported to the east. That year February 27 fell on a Saturday, and the Nazis conjectured—correctly—that the workers' families would be in their homes in greater numbers on Saturday morning than on any other day.

Past deportations had normally been accomplished with the formality of a ritual. Lists of those to be deported were made up in advance by the Reichsvereinigung, the association of the Jews of the Reich, a government-mandated organization with which all Jews were required to be registered, and which was compelled by the Nazis to administer all anti-Jewish decrees, deportation included. Those to be deported were almost always notified in advance, then ordered to report or be taken by the Gestapo to the former old people's home on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse or other collecting points. Once the prescribed allotment of Jews had been assembled—one thousand at the outset, less as time went on and the number of Jews in the city diminished—they were taken by trucks to railroad yards, where they were crammed into freight cars for the journey to the east.

This time there were no lists, no indication of a major action other than a notice to Jewish officials of the Reichsvereinigung on February 26 to organize half a dozen processing offices and as many first-aid stations. That night, troops of Heinrich Himmler's crack Praetorian Guard, the Leibstandarte of Adolf Hitler, surrounded the factories that employed Jews. Shortly after seven o'clock the next morning S.S. trucks rolled up to the factories. Troops rushed inside and grabbed every Jew they saw. The Jews were then taken to the trucks without being able to change from their working clothes or claim their winter coats. The breakfasts most of them had brought to work were also left behind.

In the meanwhile other troops had been dispatched to the apartment buildings in which Jewish families were congregated. Old persons and children were yanked from their dwellings without time to dress or pack the one suitcase the Nazis had traditionally let deportees take along, or even inform their relatives. Many children were taken without their parents. Elderly persons who were not able to climb fast enough were literally thrown onto the trucks. Many of the elderly suffered fractures.

By mid-morning thousands of Jews had been taken. A score had been brought in dead, having jumped from windows, thrown themselves under the wheels of their captors' trucks or taken potassium cyanide or overdoses of Veronal hoarded for just this dreaded moment.

Throughout the day Gestapo agents raced through the city trying to arrest the Jews before reports from the
Mundfunk
, the Jewish “mouthcast,” or warnings from friends would cause them to flee.

It would have been difficult that day for any Berliner not to notice the strange, almost frenzied tempo of official traffic through the city's streets. For a Jewish woman who had trained herself for a decade to pick up menacing signs it would have been next to impossible. Hella Riede had gone to the Kurfürstendamm that morning with a friend, as much to get away from the crowded Kaiserstrasse apartment in which she had been living as to persuade herself that she was part of the busy Saturday morning commercial life bustling all about her. Hiding her yellow star with her purse, she strolled the broad sidewalks of the tree-lined boulevard, window-shopping, then flirting with the idea of going into one of the beauty shops to get her hair done. But for her star, it was the kind of adventure she could easily get away with. She had the first line of defense in any kind of deception—an appearance that made others feel comfortable. Not only was she agreeable to look at, she seemed, with her golden hair and light skin, the prototypical “Aryan” woman. Her second line of defense was at least as formidable. She kept a lock on her emotions and could will her fears into somnolence.