The Last Jews in Berlin (7 page)

But as the cars and trucks sped by and the pedestrians turned to watch and then speculate among themselves as to what the commotion was about, Hella made her own shrewd guess and immediately set out on foot for her apartment, several miles to the east, possessed by a single frantic thought: Had Kurt, her husband, already been taken?

At last she reached the Kaiserstrasse, where, to her immense relief, no Gestapo cars or S.S. trucks were parked. And inside the apartment, to her joy, was Kurt, who had come home to look for her after news of the roundup reached him. He confirmed for Hella that the factory workers had been taken from their jobs. He had been overlooked because he was the only Jew working in a wholesale leather outlet. How long before that oversight would be corrected he could only guess.

Kurt, a lean man of twenty-nine, was five years older than Hella. What had attracted Hella to him initially was his warmth and openness and his efforts to help others, but ten years of jousting with the Nazis, of having to live constantly on the defensive had slowly turned him inward. Added to that was a severe case of myopia, which made him feel physically vulnerable.

Once in 1938, during a wave of arrests of Jews, the Gestapo had come looking for Kurt, and he and Hella had had to flee. Now, they both knew, they would have to take flight again. There was only one person who might help them, a greengrocer in their neighborhood who had been unaccountably helpful. He had smiled at Hella one afternoon and said, “How come you always shop so late in the day when the good produce is gone?”

Hella, who had been covering her star with her purse, blushed. “Because I'm Jewish,” she said.

“Come in the morning. Hide your star,” he said softly.

So she would shop early in the morning, covering the star, until one day a clerk who had seen her walking in the neighborhood when she wasn't covering the star said to her, “You are not allowed to shop at this time.” Everyone turned to stare at Hella. She fled.

A few days later there was a knock on their apartment door. It was the greengrocer. He had brought some vegetables. “From now on, come when the store closes. I'll save you some things,” he said. Even after Hella resumed her visits to the store, the greengrocer, whose name was Robert Jerneitzig, continued to bring food to their apartment and often refused to charge for it. He never explained his motives.

The Riedes didn't know it at the time, but Robert Jerneitzig's wife, to whom he was devoted, was half-Jewish. Had she not been, he might still have responded to the Riedes' plight, but he would never have voiced his feelings. Jerneitzig, a squat and stocky man, displayed a shopkeeper's disposition: he was friendly but not open. He kept both his thoughts and affairs to himself, expressing himself through his deeds. Nothing of his manner or circumstances indicated that he was well off, yet he had quietly saved enough money to buy a small house in Wittenau, an outlying district of Berlin. It was to this house that his thoughts turned once the Riedes informed him of their dire new predicament.

Jerneitzig told the Riedes that they could spend the night in his apartment, which was attached to his store. Then he telephoned Joseph Wirkus, the man who had been renting the house in Wittenau since the fall of 1941. Jerneitzig spoke with deliberate calm, telling Wirkus that he wanted to talk to him confidentially about some matters, and that they had to meet that day.

Wirkus, just past thirty, was a civilian employee of the Oberkommando des Heeres, the Army High Command. He was the chief of correspondence of one of the divisions in a center for the design of instruments of war that would later be produced by the factories. A slim, blond man of medium height, he had been rejected for military service because of a deformed elbow. (He had broken his arm in a childhood game and it had been poorly set, allowing him only partial mobility.) He liked his job—first, because he worked with a group of engineers most of whom weren't political, and second, because it carried a draft-exempt status. Whenever the military tried to grab him he had the double protection of his injury and his job. He had no taste whatever for the army or the war.

Because Wirkus was in charge of his section, he could come and go as he pleased. After receiving Jerneitzig's call he took the S-Bahn to the center of the city, then walked to the grocery on the Kaiserstrasse. Jerneitzig led him to the apartment in the back. He did not waste time. “There's a young Jewish couple I know. They need a place to stay for a few days while they find a new apartment. They can't stay in their own place any longer. You understand?”

“I understand.”

“Can they stay with you?”

Wirkus had always liked Jerneitzig because of the greengrocer's friendly ways. Moreover, they were from the same farming region, and Jerneitzig bought produce from the Wirkus family farm from time to time. But until this moment Wirkus had never trusted Jerneitzig completely. He said he would talk to his wife, but he thought he already knew the answer. They were Catholics, against the Nazis from the beginning because of the party's stand against the church. Joseph was often so openly critical of the party that had anyone denounced him he would have been arrested. Moreover, both of them took seriously their commitment to helping those in need.

But not even this charitable predisposition could keep the Wirkuses from being surprised when, returning from Mass in Wittenau the next morning, they saw Jerneitzig walking toward them, accompanied by a young couple. They were sure it was the Jewish couple—but they had not yet consented to help.

Frau Wirkus was a tender, emotional woman who easily established strong personal relationships. Her reactions to strangers were instantaneous and usually positive. Whatever ambivalence she might have felt toward the Riedes because of the potential danger was dispelled when she saw the mixture of strain and hope in their faces. Her heart went out to Hella, whom she recognized as a woman she had seen shopping in Jerneitzig's store when the Wirkuses themselves were living in an apartment over the store.

Jerneitzig had not known how much convincing he would have to do to place the Riedes. As it turned out, the four young people took to one another at once. The women were physical opposites—Frau Wirkus tall, with dark hair, Hella short and blond—but the men, they all quickly recognized, bore an amazing likeness to each other, to the point where they decided immediately to identify Kurt Riede as Joseph Wirkus' brother, who had come to Wittenau because his home in Hamburg had been bombed out. Once that decision was made, they agreed the stay would be for a week, or two weeks at most. After that the Riedes would either be able to move back to their old flat or they would have found another apartment. There was also a chance for emigration, as Kurt had been trying to arrange a bribe for a government official in exchange for emigration papers.

As the conversation swirled about him Joseph Wirkus nodded agreeably, smiling from time to time as a token of reassurance. But there were long intervals when he did not listen to the others' words. Wirkus, a man of precision by temperament and training, knew the law, and he could calibrate the dangers. Any German caught helping Jews faced automatic imprisonment, but because of his sensitive job, Wirkus knew that the penalty for him and possibly for his wife, Kadi, would be death. Life was especially precious for them at this moment; five months before, Kadi had given birth to their first child, Wilfried, an event that brought indescribable feelings of joy. Wilfried's existence raised the stakes to a level beyond life or death, for the law of the Third Reich provided that where a child was being raised in a manner inimical to the State, the child could, by court order, be removed permanently to an acceptable home. Failure to enroll one's child in the Hitler Youth was one offense that could provoke such an order. Friendship with Jews was another.

So as he voiced his own reassurances, Joseph Wirkus felt doubt. And yet with this small deed he could demonstrate, if only for himself, his aversion to the Nazis. Besides, he reminded himself, the masquerade was only for one or two weeks. When he expressed that thought to Kadi, she said she felt the same.

Had they known how long the masquerade would go on, or the danger in which it would place them, they might have been less willing to offer the Riedes a refuge.

6

H
ANS
R
OSENTHAL
had large brown eyes and a disarming smile; his presence, even to strangers, bespoke friendliness and warmth. Was it some remnant of this basic disposition that had catapulted him into his strange new adventure? Or was it that he was a good worker? All he knew for certain was that on this day in the late fall of 1942 he was in an automobile beside his employer, a bulky, taciturn, bespectacled Nazi, hurtling down a highway away from Berlin and toward Pomerania. What would happen to him when he got there he hadn't the faintest idea, but for the moment this bizarre passage was putting distance between him and his nightmares.

Although he was almost eighteen he looked less than sixteen years old. This was partly due to an aura of ingenuousness and innocence about him and partly to the years of undernourishment that had stunted his frame. As a child he had had a compact body and the gift of speed, which had made him a splendid soccer player. He was a better athlete than student. He had tried hard to make good grades while his father lived, but after his father died (at the age of thirty-seven) Hans seemed to abandon all scholastic ambitions. And by that time grades no longer mattered for a Jewish schoolboy in Germany.

His father, Kurt Rosenthal, was the oldest of three sons of a Jewish father and a Christian mother who had converted to Judaism when Kurt was twelve. Kurt had been a warm and fun-loving man whose special pleasure was playing piano in a dance band on weekends. During the week he had worked for the Deutsche Bank, the same bank that had hired him out of high school. In 1937, after twenty-one years of employment, the bank had dismissed him because he was Jewish. Prior to his dismissal Kurt had suffered a kidney ailment, which quickly worsened, and he soon died.

Four years later Hans's mother was dead of cancer, and Hans and his brother Gert, seven years his junior, were orphans. At the time of their mother's death Hans and Gert were living apart; Gert, then nine, was in an orphanage, and Hans was in Fürstenwalde, a training camp for Zionist Jews planning to emigrate to Palestine.
*

The atmosphere in which Hans Rosenthal grew up had not been especially Jewish, let alone Zionist. He and his parents and his brother had lived with his father's parents, the most religious of whom was his Grandmother Agnes, the convert to Judaism. Although Hans had been bar-mitzvahed at thirteen, there was always a tree at Christmas, so that he and Gert would not feel different from their Gentile friends. When Hans first embraced Zionism, it was not out of any desire to settle in Palestine but solely to escape Germany. Only later, after working in Fürstenwalde, did he become excited and committed. But his mother's death intervened, and Hans knew then that he couldn't emigrate. Even though he was only sixteen, he was now responsible for Gert.

A few days after his mother's death Hans was given permission to leave Fürstenwalde and return to Berlin to live with Gert in the orphanage. Three weeks later all of the Jews at Fürstenwalde were sent to Auschwitz. For Hans it was the first of many narrow escapes.

In April 1942 Hans turned seventeen. The director of the orphanage told him that he was now too old to remain there, and in August, Hans was transferred to a home for young Jewish men on the Rosenstrasse. Two months later everyone at the orphanage—Gert included—was deported.

Hans was so upset over Gert's deportation that his own second instance of good fortune scarcely registered. All that spring he had looked in vain for someone to hide his little brother. Even his Grandmother Agnes had refused. “It's impossible to hide a ten-year-old,” she had said. “He can't remain quiet.”

Hans soon found a job working in a Berlin factory that manufactured small containers of canned heat used by soldiers in the field to warm their meals. The factory would receive huge shipments of old cans, recondition them, fill them with flammable hydrocarbon jelly and seal them. It was good business; the owner, Alfred Hanne, bought the used cans for thirty marks a carload, then sold each unit for twenty pfennigs. Hanne behaved correctly to his mostly Jewish workers but without the slightest sentiment. Several of the Jewish employees had once been wealthy—one had owned a department store, another a shop on the Kurfürstendamm—but the past had long since ceased to be of consequence. A worker's salary was based solely on performance: for every 1,000 tins manufactured above 4,000 a day Hanne paid a bonus of five marks.

Hans was soon making 9,000 tins a day. He could not allow himself to consider that his earnestness was in behalf of his enemy. Life had been reduced to an exquisitely simple precept: make yourself invaluable to someone and you'll survive.

What better proof of that than this journey with Hanne? A week before, the owner had approached him and said, “I'm opening a new factory in Pomerania. If you want to come with me, you can.”

“I have a star,” Hans reminded him. “How can I go?”

“You'll go. You'll take the star off and you'll go.”

When they arrived in Torgelow, the Pomeranian town where Hanne's new factory was located, Hans discovered he was the only Jew. He did not put his star back on. Hanne quartered him in a bunk room in a building adjoining the factory hall, where he lived much better than the other workers, a few of them Belgians, most of them captured Russians who spent their nights shivering in a nearby camp.

A few days after Hans arrived in Torgelow the Gestapo raided the Jewish youth home where he had been living before he left Berlin and sent all of its inhabitants to Auschwitz. His third close call. Had Hanne known? Hans could only wonder.

Weeks passed. Hanne's manner seemed to soften. He no longer shouted so much at the workers. He ordered extra portions of potatoes and turnips for them. The Belgian prisoners told Hans they thought the change in Hanne's manner was related to the German defeat at Stalingrad. Perhaps he had concluded that the tide of battle had turned against the Germans and the war would soon be over, in which case prisoners of war and Jews who vouched for his decent treatment would be extremely helpful.