She may have been completely dispossessed by 1943, but from May 1940 until January 1943—or later?—she had had a position of relative privilege within the Reichsvereinigung, running her old-age home. By the time she is moved to Auguststrasse, she earns 130 RM per month, of which 42 RM are deducted from her already extremely meager wages for her room and board. She is living in one room, with nothing.
I realize I must go backward in time again, to better understand her experience—and thus, also, Valy’s—working in the Reichsvereinigung, and why they were spared for a time.
A few days later, I take the train up to Hamburg to meet Dr. Beate Meyer at the Institut Für die Geschichte der Deutschen Juden (Institute for the History of German Jews) to ask her for help with my questions, the ones I know to ask, the ones I haven’t yet discovered. She has been writing about the Reichsvereinigung for many years, so many that nearly everyone I ask—from the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., to the various academics I consult in Berlin—says things like, “Well, you must have spoken to Beate Meyer? No? Well, then”—and so I do. She and I will meet several times, both in Germany and in the United States. She is not terribly keen to be in a story, but she is very willing to talk.
Meyer is soft spoken, with wild, white-blond hair and eyes pouched and weary, behind large glasses, from reading too much about the years of persecution. She is a bit younger than the generation that some in Europe call “’68ers,” one of the generation that turned on its parents, that upended Germany, forced it to look in at itself, at its past.
“In the beginning,” she says, “in the time of emigration,” when emigration was still legal, before October 1941, “there were a lot of people on social welfare . . . people who remained in Germany because their relatives emigrated and they were old people, sick people, children without parents, and so on. They remained in Germany and the Reichsvereinigung had to find homes and orphanages and hospitals and hospices,” she tells me. Jews needed this social welfare network when they were kicked off the mainstream system; the Reichsvereinigung needed workers to run all those homes, and schools, and spaces. It was work, and it was better than forced labor in the factories, where any rules of health and safety and time management were purposely, cruelly, upended. The Reichsvereinigung was beholden to, really at the whim of, the Gestapo, but also tried to work for the community. That tension held, for a time.
It is a damp day, and the halls of the Institute for the History of German Jews are quiet, save the faint footfalls of the occasional student. It is an old Jugendstil building, with the feel of a hybrid hospital and university. I am hungry and tired and feeling very pregnant though I have months to go before I give birth.
I show Meyer a few of Valy’s letters, especially those that come in October 1941, the moment deportations to the east started and emigration was cut off. When deportations began, Meyer says, Reichsvereinigung officials “had some illusions” about who could stay and who would go. It seemed, at the time, some—possibly like Valy, and certainly like Toni—would remain “necessary” to the Reich—it’s a word that carries great weight in the context of survival, and of creating a hierarchy among Jews. What did they think? I ask, meaning the workers of the Reichsvereinigung, the workers like Valy who made no real decisions about their fellow Jews, but were in the system, somewhere in the mix. What did they know about what it meant to be sent away? And what about the leadership? Did they know much more?
Meyer sighs, heavily. It’s not an easy question—she can’t know exactly. But she tries to give me an answer. At first, she says, “the heads of the Reichsvereinigung thought the deportations would only include a part of the Jews, that part would be evacuated and then everything would [settle down] and then everything would . . . They could have community and religious life and could live life as people of . . . yes, as a second class, as underdogs. But they thought they could live [like that] in the German Reich. And they would survive. But in the end of 1941, they realized that that was an illusion—that the deportations would go on until the last Jew was included.” Belatedly the Reichsvereinigung appealed to the Joint Distribution Committee to procure visas for its higher functionaries. Perhaps that explained Toni’s Joint card, I thought.
Some sixteen thousand Jews were rounded up and expelled from the capital from autumn 1941 to the following fall. The social ostracism was minor in comparison to the terror of daily life. In the late fall of 1942, Jews in Berlin with access to illegal radios heard BBC broadcasts about Jews being murdered by gas. It was, quite literally, unbelievable. And yet, undeniably, people were disappearing, everywhere, most never to be heard from again.
I tell Meyer that Valy writes, desperately, about emigration up until her last letter, hopes for something to come through—to Cuba, to anywhere. I thought that was completely impossible. Meyer says I’m wrong. “Emigration from Germany was still possible until the war began,” she says, despite the curbs on age, on ability to leave, despite dozens of technical obstacles. Small handfuls of people were able to flee. “There were some so-called illegal immigrations when ships were hired and people were put on the ships, but it was not clear that [refugees] could enter a country [they arrived in] or if they would get a visa for a country where they could stay.” Perhaps, I realize with a start, Alfred Jospe was right. With $150 per person, maybe Valy and her mother would have made it to Chile. “The Gestapo tried to force the Jewish people to go on ships but the Reichsvereinigung hesitated,” Meyer explains. “They said, ‘It’s too dangerous.’”
In Austria, Jews were less cautious, she says. They sought these extra-legal options—through Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, to Palestine—sooner, and more often, than their northern neighbors. What made the difference? I ask. “The German Jewish leaders were Germans!” She laughs, a bit bitterly. “They thought everything should go in an orderly way.” The Austrians just wanted out. Austrian Jews, she reminds me, had been swept under by a quick wave of institutionalized anti-Semitism that began with fury in 1938, with the Anschluss, when five years of progressive anti-Jewish legislation endured by their German neighbors was imposed on the newly incorporated Reich in a matter of weeks. In Germany, on the other hand, the “German Jewish leaders became familiar with the rising persecution,” a slow sinking, a loss of footing, that took place gradually, from 1933 on. Each subsequent humiliation was endured, weathered, surmounted. “But as they delayed the chance to leave, the Reich decided that they wouldn’t let them leave after all.”
Not everyone delayed. More than half of Germany’s Jews had left by 1938. It was the others, those left behind, the girls who had not been sent out, so their brothers and fathers could escape—as Valy tells my grandfather “only women are left”—the elderly, the infirm; it was the families that couldn’t quite believe it would get any worse—when that group began to clamor to leave, the doors had closed.
Jews like Valy and Toni scrambled to remain relevant; work was literally the difference between life and deportation. Meanwhile, the Nazis prepared to liquidate the population. But that process couldn’t take place all at once; extermination took time. The German manufacturing sector still needed this labor force, after all. And the camps themselves were not ready.
Meyer continued, narrating the movement from forced immigration to expulsion to extermination. “They needed trains and camps and guards,” she says. “First they brought [Jews] to the ghettos for a certain time and after that they would be brought to other ghettos far in the east but nothing was prepared. Then [the Nazis] decided to murder the Jews.” Murders were at a rapid clip in the east. Five hundred thousand had been killed between June and the end of 1941 by the Einsatzgruppen in the east. “But the decision to murder the German Jews, too, was made in December 1941.” There is no document that confirms this, but it is the date that most historians agree was the turning point for the fate of German Jewry.
Some who remained in the Reich when the deportations began received ominous notes from th
e ghettos of the east with coded words like “widow” written after a name, so that those who received the message would know—a husband had died. But how? Why? That was unclear, unexplained. Those who were sent on early transports to the ghettos in Lodz and Riga had little contact with people back at home: a few letters, and a few eyewitnesses, reported conditions that seemed unbelievable—hygiene had disintegrated, food was scarce, death everywhere. In 1942, Marianne Strauss, the girl who was in the Kindergartenseminar, the subject of Mark Roseman’s book A Past in Hiding, was able to discover a glimpse, through letters smuggled by a sympathetic—and daring—Aryan, the horrific conditions of the Izbica ghetto her lover had been deported to in Poland, along with his family.
But it was not merely the destination that was terrifying to the Jews of Berlin like Valy and her mother. The collection points in Berlin were also awful: Jewish workers in these makeshift transit camps, one based at the Levetzowstrasse Synagogue, another at an old-age home at Grosse Hamburger Strasse, were told that, under penalty of their own deportation, they could not report back what they saw; they could not pass messages back to those who remained behind. The so-called evacuations were terrifying, mortifying; a foreshadowing of deprivations to come. Inmates were subjected to body searches in front of their neighbors; rooms were locked to prevent flight; dozens upon dozens of children were packed into a room with space for, perhaps, twenty, with fetid air and endless anguish all around. “A dreadful future awaited them, and some of them already guessed this. . . . The older ones wanted to be left alone. . . . The smaller ones cried for their mothers, from whom they were cruelly separated in the same building,” remembered worker Edith Dietz after the war. In the former Levetzowstrasse Synagogue, women threw themselves over the balcony to their deaths in the pews below; the sound of sobbing filled the air for hours, days, on end.
But if 1941 was dreadful, it was 1942—after Valy’s letters end—when the prospects for even those with work became much, much worse. That fall, Alois Brunner arrived in Berlin. “He was the Nazi responsible for deportations from Vienna,” explained Meyer. The Gestapo in Vienna was considered more brutal, more efficient—more effective. Brunner—at the time, all of thirty years old—was brought to Berlin to streamline the deportations and speed them up in the goal of a judenrein, or Jew-free, Berlin. Instead of random deportations, Brunner “changed the assembly camps in Berlin into a kind of prison and he caught the Jews in the streets and in their houses.” He would seal off whole city blocks, encircle entire apartment buildings; he gave orders to liquidate the old-age homes and orphanages. Deportations were no longer piecemeal; now everyone in the dragnet would be taken.
No one was protected any longer; not the Reichsvereinigung workers, not their charges. “Only the Jews who lived in privileged mixed marriages,” said Meyer. “But a normal Jewish woman who was not a so-called Mischling”—a person of half-Aryan descent—“was not able to avoid the star. Despite that fact, a lot of Jews didn’t wear it when they left their homes because they said it was dangerous to wear it and dangerous not to wear it.” With the star, they were targets in the street—of taunting, harassment, beatings, random arrest, or worse—but if they decided to forgo the star, woe be the man or woman who was discovered to be a Jew defying the law. That was considered sabotage; that meant immediate deportation.
“So they avoided [the star] but they had to wear it in their working place,” Meyer continued. “There were controls by the Gestapo and they had to wear [the star] when they left the house because non-Jewish neighbors could denounce them for not wearing it. . . . [Then] they would get a notice they [had been selected] for the next deportation.”
With or without the star, Valy and her mother, like all the Jews in Berlin at this point, knew that the chance of deportation was coming closer and closer, whatever it meant to be sent to the east; the reality of which remained unclear. “These deportations were something monstrous,” wrote Camilla Neumann in Berlin, at the end of the war. “It was horrible when the dark car with the SS bandits stopped in front of the door and picked up the careworn men and women and the innocent children. . . . A large number of people from the Jewish community had to participate in the round-ups. They were authorized by the Gestapo and one had to go with them. If one resisted, they used force. They said that otherwise it would cost them their own heads. We were very distressed that Jews allowed themselves to be involved in something like that. But it did not stop with that. Finally the Jews were caught like dogs. They were rounded up from the stores, from the waiting rooms of doctors, from the streets and were loaded onto trucks. If one did not climb on quickly enough, one was shoved on.”
As the existential threat of expulsion hung over them, the indignities and deprivations continued. Though Valy’s letters to my grandfather had stopped, from the Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv records I see that Valy and her mother work on, through the following year. But life began deteriorating at an ever more rapid clip, and those who waited for word of her—my grandfather, her uncle, her friends—heard nothing further and surely feared what they were experiencing.
In early January 1942, Valy and her mother were forced to turn in all remaining warm items to the Gestapo: wool sweaters and clothing and socks; ski boots and skis; furs. In February, they were banned from purchasing newspapers; in March, they were stripped of the right to use all public transport unless they had a necessary seven-kilometer commute—and paperwork documenting that. By summer, the shopping hour restrictions were made stricter: Jews could no longer line up before the four p.m. start time, and they would not be served if the hour ended before they had shopped, even if they had entered a shop in advance of the five p.m. end-of-shopping hour. In October, Jews were banned from buying books. Many of the restrictions were published in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, the Jewish newspaper controlled by the Gestapo. It got thinner and thinner as a paper and began to include practical life skills, like how to cook an omelet with no egg, liver sausages with no liver, make coffee with no coffee. The editor in chief had a heart attack and died.
On one brutal day in October 1942, leaders of the Reichsvereinigung were told to assemble staff in the building of the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. Once inside, they were told to select five hundred lower-level workers who were no longer “necessary” for work. “There was a terrible scene,” says Meyer. “The head of the social welfare department,” the woman who likely employed Valy, “had a nervous breakdown, saying, ‘Take me, take me, but not my staff!’ And others refused [to choose].” Two days later, the Gestapo declared that for every person selected for deportation who tried to escape, one higher-ranking official would be shot. The Reichsvereinigung members themselves went to flush out those who had evaded the edict.
That was actually the second terrible event of 1942, says Meyer. The first was when a small group of young Jews, led by a Communist, attacked an anti-Semitic and anti-Communist exhibit on the Soviet Union, wounding a handful of Nazis. The resistance fighters were sentenced to death for the bombing, their family members were deported, and the leaders of the Reichsvereinigung were forced to stand for hours on end, facing a wall, not told what their punishment was being meted out for. In the aftermath of that incident, Meyer says, five hundred were arrested and two hundred fifty shot immediately.
Eventually, Meyer emphasizes, as the Reichsvereinigung prepared list after list of Jews to be sent east, those who remained in Berlin had come to realize that they were all to be deported, and the only reason they weren’t being sent at once was merely a question of infrastructure, not intention. This realization taints the image of the Reichsvereinigung and has shaped much of Meyer’s work. Why did they not warn people to hide? Did Toni—eventually a “leader” in the Reichsvereinigung, at least in terms of her old-age home—did she hold any responsibility? Did Valy, who was merely placed by these Jewish leaders but did, after all, receive her salary from them? They were cogs, more than anything, worker bees in an enormous hive.
But of the chiefs? Leaders like Rabbi Leo Baeck, those who determined the lists of deportations, those who heard more from the Gestapo? This conversation spawned half a century of debate.
Hannah Arendt unequivocally believed that the work of the Reichsvereinigung was akin to what their counterparts were forced to do in Poland, where the Gestapo strong-armed Jewish communities into forming Judenräte, Jewish councils, which were forced to aid the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews. Scathingly, she wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem:
To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. . . . In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation.
Arendt believed, conclusively, that without these helper Jews, the sheer need for manpower alone would have mucked up the works of the Gestapo; that the Jews themselves smoothed the way for their own destruction. She believed that the immorality of the helpful work of the Jewish councils was as clear as the immorality of their executioners; that the moral breakdown of European society extended to the victims themselves. But Arendt’s worldview was predicated on her knowledge of the full destruction of European Jewry, knowledge that Berlin’s Jews (and Warsaw’s and Amsterdam’s) did not have.
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