Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  He looked at me as if I had gone mad, and so I had in a way: mad with fear and revulsion. I put my few coins for the ersatz coffee on the table, with a tip, and he escorted me to the door. I felt a need to be accompanied safely out, and I was glad once I was back in the street again.

  How often had my father quoted from Pirkei Owaus – Sayings of the Fathers – ‘Do not separate yourself from the community!’ But what I had just seen, downgraded and in the process of dissolution, condemned to death, was no longer my community. I wanted no part of it.

  6

  Toni Kirschstein was one of the few people with whom I still had regular contact in the spring of 1942. I had first met her on a Sunday walk with my father. As we were passing the Jewish Cultural League’s theatre in Kommandantenstrasse, a matinée cinema showing had just come to an end. Members of the audience were spilling out into the street.

  ‘Hello!’ A lady with fair, curly hair and a pretty face greeted us as she left the cinema.

  The Eger family had known Dr Antonie Kirschstein for many years. She was married to a school friend of my uncle Herbert. This man, Felix Kirschstein, had never learned any useful professional skills, but liked the good life. Young Antonie, who came with a large dowry, was just the thing for him. He married her, but was consistently unfaithful to his wife for years. By the time I met her they had long been divorced.

  Toni Kirschstein was anything but the ideal of the good, domestic little woman. After completing her training as an opera singer, she had made a name for herself as an expert neurologist and psychiatrist. When she smiled she was beautiful; dimples showed in her cheeks, and you could see her regular teeth. But as soon as she stood up it was obvious that she had severe difficulty in walking. She had congenital dislocation of both hips and walked with what is known as a duck gait; she would push one leg out in front of her in a wide arc, then bring up the other behind it.

  When we met outside the cinema, she was arm in arm with a man whom she introduced by saying, ‘Meet Pope Leo XXII.’ The man’s first name was Leo, and as she herself remarked, he was the twenty-second man with whom she had had an amorous relationship. She was entirely uninhibited in showing off about the number of men she had slept with.

  I was immediately fascinated by her. My parents were not prudes, but I cannot imagine that my mother would have liked to be acquainted with Toni Kirschstein in the old days. However, my mother was no longer alive, and the crazy time in which we were living meant that people drew closer together and set less store on the traditional conventions. So we stood outside the cinema for a while, talking, until Toni Kirschstein said, ‘We can’t put down roots here, but I live quite close.’ In fact it was in Neue Jakobstrasse, and she told us to drop in and see her as soon as possible, so that we could chat in more comfort, adding that she could always spare a cup of ersatz coffee, and that was the beginning of the friendship.

  Later on, it was she who had helped me to find my room with the Jacobsohns. She herself had to give up her own apartment, and moved with her son, who was slightly younger than me, to the apartment of a distinguished old lady near Sophie-Charlotte-Platz who sublet part of it to her. This landlady of hers had once been very rich. Her husband had travelled all over the world, bringing home valuable hand-made objects. Toni Kirschstein, who was no longer allowed to practise as a doctor, didn’t have a penny, and she quite often abstracted something from the cabinet of travel souvenirs and sold it on the black market. When her landlady noticed, she would screech, ‘This is outrageous! You’re a thief!’

  ‘What else am I to do, you silly old bat?’ Toni would snap back. I was once present at one of these quarrels. It was terrible. Her lax morals were one side of Toni Kirschstein, her great generosity another; she would share her last piece of bread with her son and me.

  A sociable circle regularly met at her place, and I was happy to be part of it. That was how I came to know Dr Ludwig Dahlheim, an elderly gentleman from a highly assimilated Jewish family. He had rather affected manners, and often mentioned having been a pupil at the elite Königliche Wilhelm grammar school, popularly known as ‘the patent-leather-boots academy’. His wife Thea, née Toller, was a niece of the famous dramatist Ernst Toller. The Dahlheims also had Ludwig’s sister living with them; she was known as Hildchen, and was severely mentally handicapped. The Dahlheim family had always been ashamed of her, kept her hidden away and sometimes actually locked her in her room.

  Once, however, when they had a very distinguished aristocratic visitor, things went wrong. A communicating door had been left unlocked, it suddenly opened, Hildchen came in and went over to a valuable figurine of a dog standing on the mantelpiece. She made a deep curtsey, laughed in her weak-minded way and said, ‘The lion won’t hurt little children. The lion is a German animal!’ and with that the secret was out.

  When Ludwig’s sister Eva told me this story she added, ‘So now Hilde uses the living room with the rest of us and isn’t hidden away any more. The Nazis have taken everything away from us, not just our possessions and our native land, our lives as well. But oddly enough that’s a kind of liberation; they’ve released us from idiotic conventions.’

  One day a letter for me arrived at Schmidstrasse. I looked in surprise at the sender’s name: Blei. He was a judge in the district court, and I did not know him personally, but my father had often mentioned him. In rather elaborate handwriting, and with old Franconian courtesy, he told me why he was getting in touch. ‘A girl like you, of a very respectable family, ought not to be on friendly terms with someone who not only has no basic morality left at all, but is positively criminal, and is doing her best to conspire with our worst enemies in order to support herself.’

  It was put in such a way that I understood what he meant, but the censor did not: Toni Kirschstein had connections with the Gestapo. That was not entirely unknown to me. Someone else had warned me; Recha Frankenstein, my mother’s cousin, had told me that Dr Kirschstein had applied to be a Gestapo agent. Her offer, however, had not been accepted, because that nefarious institution took no one with a physical handicap.

  And finally, Toni Kirschstein herself had told me that she had set an informer on me. Crazy as she was, she had warned me of the man in the next breath, saying that this Dr Spiegel was a con man and a lunatic.

  He did indeed turn up one evening at my room in Schmidstrasse, telling me straight out that we would be seeing a great deal of each other, and I was to tell him about everyone I knew. Then he had tried to impress me by all kinds of silly psychological tricks. He had claimed to have supernatural powers, asked me to think of a number between one and ten, and he would tell me what number it was. That worked several dozen times until I decided to set a trap for him. So I did not think of any particular number, only the plain and emphatic word ‘Arsehole!’ He promptly replied, ‘I don’t know what you were thinking of, but it wasn’t a number between one and ten. You can’t cheat me!’

  I knew how this trick worked – from Toni Kirschstein herself. She had told me that when you were thinking intensively of a word, you pronounced it in your mind, and so long as you had only a few words available – as in the case of numbers between one and ten – your involuntary movements in the region of the larynx could easily be interpreted.

  Spiegel tried other experiments with me. He stared hard at me, and pretended my father was speaking to me through him. Here pride in my education came to my aid. ‘My father would never have used the kind of language in which his office staff spoke,’ I said, ‘but you probably don’t even know the difference.’

  At this point he lost interest in me. ‘It’s getting late, so I’ll be off now,’ he said. I knew I couldn’t afford to make an enemy of the man, so I promised to inform him of anything special that I might notice anywhere.

  Before I tore up Judge Blei’s letter, I learned some phrases in it by heart. Alone in my furnished room at the Jacobsohns’ apartment, I talked out loud to myself. I imagined what my parents would have said in this situation: ‘We
feel sorry for this deeply unhappy woman, whom Fate has mistreated so badly. But she is depraved, and the loss of all moral principle cannot be approved. We must withdraw from her society.’

  With much labour and several drafts, I wrote an answer to Judge Blei thanking him for his well-intended warning. I explained that it would not be wise of me to let the lady in question know that I intended to break off my contact with her. I could only drop the acquaintance, I said, carefully and gradually.

  But a few days later the whole thing took a sensational turn. Toni Kirschstein’s cheerful social occasions had steadily declined to a vulgar and indeed semi-criminal level. I was regarded as a great humorist among her friends, and had the reputation of being scintillating in society – something that, of course, I enjoyed.

  That evening Toni Kirschstein told her guests that she had a great surprise for us. ‘We’ll put the light out and then have fun – any man with any girl, any girl with any man.’ She was proposing what we would call group sex today. I was repelled, but laughed and said, ‘However, first I’ve had a brainwave. I’ve thought of something very amusing, but I’ll need to have my coat on before I tell you.’

  ‘We can’t wait!’ said our hostess, and brought me my coat. Everyone was looking at me, waiting for the point of the joke. ‘I’m leaving now,’ I said.

  Then her son Wolfgang spoke up. ‘I’m going with her,’ he announced calmly, and the two of us left the building.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  So I took him home with me. We stole into the Jacobsohns’ apartment. I didn’t want anyone to hear me bringing a young man home. There was nothing for it but for the two of us to lie in my narrow bed. We were very proud of ourselves for lying there side by side like brother and sister. Next morning he crept out of the building first thing.

  Later I realised that I had let myself in for something else through my acquaintanceship with Toni Kirschstein. Frau Jacobsohn had told me about her brother-in-law. He suffered badly from Parkinson’s disease, was confined to a wheelchair and had great difficulty in sleeping. My landlady asked whether I couldn’t get hold of a large quantity of really strong sleeping pills. She would pay well for them, she said.

  I put the problem to Toni Kirschstein. ‘Nothing easier,’ she said cheerfully. She had already broken the law by selling prescriptions for morphine to addicts. Now she made out a few prescriptions and told me to buy the pills at different places all over Berlin. If the pharmacists asked questions, I was to say, ‘It’s not for me, it’s for my neighbour.’

  I acquired the pills, and shared my earnings half and half with Toni Kirschstein. Soon after that, Frau Jacobsohn’s brother-in-law died. Months later I noticed a strange couple at a funfair. The woman was wearing an immaculate tailor-made skirt suit, pre-war quality, the best English cloth; the man, who must have been seventy, was constantly stroking her behind with a large paw, which she seemed to enjoy. When she turned, I recognised Frau Jacobsohn’s sister, the widow of the sufferer from Parkinson’s disease. A little awkwardly, she introduced me to her new friend, a doorman who lived in her neighbourhood. She told me that his wife had also had Parkinson’s disease, and their respective spouses had died at almost the same time. ‘We’re companions in misfortune,’ she added.

  I felt very queasy on hearing this story. But I told myself that all I had done was to get hold of sleeping pills to help a man suffering from insomnia, no more. I examined my conscience and told myself that I had suspected nothing wrong in what I’d done. However, Toni Kirschstein had grinned and said, ‘These would fell a mammoth.’ With all her experience of life, of course she had immediately realised what was going on.

  * Translator’s note: The medical term for this condition is oxycephaly.

  * From 1933 to 1942, this position was held by Heinrich Hölscher.

  * On 24 March 1942, the Reich Ministry of the Interior also banned Jews from using transport within the city centre of Berlin; only journeys of over seven kilometres to work were allowed.

  * Translator’s note: In German the word Schwanz = tail, of an animal or in this case a comet, is also a slang term for the penis.

  THREE

  A rainbow of unimaginable beauty

  Attempts at Flight; Going Underground

  1

  It was not long after I had moved into Schmidstrasse that Ernst Wolff came to see me. He arrived out of the blue. The son of a very distinguished Berlin Jewish family, he was unmarried and at the time was approaching fifty. His father had been chairman of the Old Synagogue in Heidereuter Gasse for many years.

  I had worked for some time unpaid in Ernst Wolff’s family research archives before I was forced to go to work for Siemens. At the time I had fallen in love with him. My feelings were stormy but still rather naïvely emotional. I had hoped in vain for some sign that he returned them. It was out of the question for a girl to make the first move.

  And now he made this surprise visit. ‘Your papa would probably have been very angry with me for making advances to his little girl,’ he announced, ‘but now there’s no one to protect you from the importunate attentions of men.’ I was startled by the poor taste of this remark, when my father had been dead for only a few weeks. But all the same, I was in love, so a relationship soon developed between us. For me, it became the first deep love of my life.

  Ernst Wolff was profoundly rooted in tradition; it would be difficult to think of anyone Jewish whose attitudes and upbringing were more Jewish. He consequently had a great and significant influence on the development of my personality.

  But my intimacy with him did not bring me the fulfilment I longed for. I found our physical relations disappointing, but I didn’t know why. I had little experience in such matters, and I knew no clever, adult person to whom I could pour out my heart. Only much later was I to find out what the matter with Ernst Wolff really was.

  I was often in the kitchen these days when Frau Jacobsohn was cooking or washing the dishes. We had made friends by now and could talk for hours on end. Once I told her I had heard that Jewish girls could get a Chinese passport by marrying Chinese men. It protected them from persecution and even meant that they could emigrate.

  ‘Try it,’ my landlady said. ‘You don’t have to think about anyone else. Over in Neue Jakobstrasse there’s a building where a lot of Chinese live. Quite high up, I think, the second or third floor.’

  I went in search of it at once. Most of the apartments had names like Müller and Schulze on their doors, but one of them bore the names of Ping Pang, Ding Dang, Jang Jau and so on. I rang that doorbell. The door opened, and the entrance hall filled up with a whole crowd of Chinese men. The oldest and most dignified-looking seemed to be the spokesman for the group, and I turned to him.

  ‘Excuse me, please – I’m looking for someone who can give lessons in your language. Chinese is so wonderful, and linked to such a high level of culture, that I’d like to learn the language myself.’

  ‘You not wanting Chinese learning,’ he replied, ‘you wanting sham marriage making.’ He spoke broken German with a heavy Chinese accent.

  ‘You’re right,’ I admitted. ‘I’m Jewish, and I want to leave this country. But I didn’t like to come straight out with it.’

  ‘Sham marriage cost forty thousand marks,’ he explained. Well, I don’t remember the precise sum, but it was a crazy one and entirely beyond my means.

  ‘Then forgive me for disturbing you. Goodbye. I don’t have that kind of money.’

  Once again it all happened very fast. ‘Wait, wait!’ he said. ‘There is other way. We make real marriage. That cost nothing. I come this evening and we celebrate engagement.’

  He asked me for my address, and I willingly let him have it. Sure enough, he turned up a couple of hours later in Schmidstrasse bringing a lot of food and a bottle of wine with him. What a feast! Of course I shared it with the Jacobsohns, so for once the children had a proper supper.

  From now on
I was engaged to Shu Ka Ling – or Ling Shu Ka, in the Chinese manner of arranging names. But to marry we needed permission from the mayor of the city. I had to apply to the relevant authority, and didn’t know what I would need to do so. Moritz Jacoby, my guardian, sent me to see a lawyer called Lignitz, who was an Aryan and specialised in foreign law. I introduced myself to this elderly gentleman as the daughter of a late colleague of his, and began by asking him what this consultation would cost me. He patted my hand reassuringly and said, ‘It won’t cost anything. What’s this about, then?’

  I told him my story, and he explained how and to whom I should apply. He also dictated a specimen letter into a recording machine and gave it to me to take away with me.

  My Chinese fiancé was a nice man, and generous. He gave me presents now and then. But we did not come any closer; after all, we could hardly converse with each other. Privately I thought: if I can get a Chinese passport through him, that would be excellent, but this isn’t a relationship that will come to anything. He too probably felt that there was no real attraction on my side, and that at the same time I was conducting a very different relationship, one that mattered a great deal to me.

  Once he arrived at my lodgings on Friday evening, just as I was setting out for the synagogue in Heidereuter Gasse. I simply took him with me, and enjoyed showing off to the other Jewish girls arm in arm with him. That gave them all something to gossip about, miserable as these times were. Many of my friends knew that I was really in a relationship with Ernst Wolff, who moved in the best conservative Jewish circles.

  A few days after this incident I had an unexpected visitor. Hecht, the cantor, was at my door. I had been seen in the synagogue with a Chinese man, he said. On behalf of the head of the community, he wanted to point out to me, poor orphan child as I was, that this kind of thing would not do. We had a long dispute in which I quoted from the Bible and cited Saul in support of my arguments. When the cantor left, he said, ‘After all, you’re right. I have three daughters of marriageable age myself. Do you happen to know any Chinese who might suit them?’