But now she wanted to hear my own story first. I began by telling her about the rubber director and his aquariums, but then I interrupted my own account. ‘I don’t really want to go on. I’m afraid all this sounds incredible.’ Camilla didn’t agree. ‘Some things are so absurd that no one could make them up, not even the most imaginative film director.’
Finally, she told me what had happened: while she was at her expensive hairdresser’s in the Kurfürstendamm, someone had been rummaging around in her desk, and had spilled some ink in the process. The perpetrator of this dreadful deed had taken a pair of expensive and delicate lacy French panties from the bedroom and used it to mop up the ink, then throwing the incriminating garment out of the window, for fear of being caught in the act. Next day a neighbour had rung Frau Fiochi’s doorbell, returning that unusual item, which he held in his fingertips.
The intruder had also broken into all her cosmetics and tried them. And someone had opened the preserving jars in the cellar to sample the contents. She had been absolutely sure I was the culprit, she said, and she hadn’t even been cross with me, because she thought such conduct was a normal reaction to the situation in which I found myself.
Then she had discussed all this with her sister-in-law Karola Schenk. Karola, however, had thought her suspicions far-fetched. ‘Hanni?’ she asked – it was by that name that the two of them knew me – ‘Never!’ But Frau Fiochi insisted on her point. ‘It would be perfectly understandable, considering the way she was exploited and overworked here. In her place I’d have set fire to the whole villa!’
However, some time after saying such a cool goodbye to me, there had been other incidents in her house. So now her suspicion was turned on the new Frau Fiochi, who lived far away in Italy.
One evening she had come home from Berlin and called for Inge. She had finally found her trainee in the cellar. The girl shrieked when she saw her mistress and upturned a jar of strawberry compote over her own head. Camilla described the scene to me about twenty times, and I had to keep asking about it and expressing astonishment. ‘Strawberry compote, really? Strawberry compote!’
Preserved strawberries were the height of luxury at this time. Camilla Fiochi had only one or two strawberry beds in her garden, and you could hardly ever buy strawberries in the shops. Presumably Inge had opened a jar out of sheer boredom, and was just drinking some of the juice from the strawberries when Frau Fiochi entered the cellar. The real identity of the kobold haunting the villa was now obvious; hoping not to be caught in flagrante, the girl must have tried to hide the jar behind her in a hurry, but succeeded only in tipping the compote over her head.
While Camilla told her tale, darkness had fallen outside, and it was time to make supper. Inge was summoned. She came in with her head bowed, and when told to apologise to me muttered, ‘Sorry.’ She couldn’t get anything more out.
‘That’s all right,’ I replied. I wasn’t for a moment angry with her; the whole story was a matter of complete indifference to me.
My second stay in Zeuthen was not so very different from the first, but now I knew that all those unedifying scenes between Camilla and me would soon come to an end, and we would be friends again. If there were times when she called me an idiot, that soon turned to laughter, and she shook her head at herself. Once we needed to cut another slice of bread during supper, and I said, ‘Do let me do it. The kitchen’s in spotless order, and I wouldn’t want crumbs falling on the floor.’ At that she giggled like a child, came round the table, hugged me and said, ‘You’re every bit as crazy as I am.’
As a performer, she always wore trousers because they worked well as a training costume. In all kinds of situations, she would suddenly jump up, legs straddled wide apart, and do the splits. She thought poorly of her trainee Inge for not practising ballet positions or arching her back, hands on the floor, in the bridge pose.
Gymnastic training often took place in the rehearsal room of the Kaufholds’ place. This roller-skating troupe, who were friends of the Fiochis, lived nearby. My job was to hold the suspension harness, a block-and-tackle device securing a trapeze artist who had been hoisted up into the dome above the room.
Inge, fastened to the suspension harness, would climb a ladder to the trapeze where she rehearsed her act. Or rather, tried to rehearse her act: while I held the thick, unbreakable rope, she dangled from the domed ceiling like a dead weight.
On one occasion Frau Fiochi shouted and raged, finally said she would rehearse the act herself, and went over to the suspension harness. Just before, she had been bullying me yet again, sending me over to a corner of the room with a cotton-wool ball and checking while I made sure that there wasn’t a speck of dust left there.
I was furious myself, and now I took my revenge: when I was to let my host down from the dome again I did it very slowly, on purpose. ‘Are you going to leave me hovering in the air for the rest of my days?’ she screeched angrily. Thereupon I let her drop like a stone, pulling the rope taut again only just before she reached the floor. She cried out in alarm.
Camilla Fiochi regularly went to see her lawyer, Dr Hildegard Stahlberg, who had her legal practice close to the Kurfürstendamm. One day Dr Stahlberg told her that she could no longer afford to spend several hours on every consultation with her client. She simply could not make head or tail of Frau Fiochi’s chaotic tales, and asked her to write down exactly what demands she was making of her ex-husband. It was up to me to do the job; I spent hour after hour sitting with Camilla, reducing her flow of words to four or five clear points, which I noted down clearly and objectively on a sheet of A4 paper. I then made a fair copy of the whole thing under the heading ‘Information’, as I remembered they used to do in my father’s office.
When Dr Stahlberg saw this document, she apparently said, ‘You’ve got another lawyer!’ Camilla Fiochi told her that she had a young Jewish girl whose father had been a lawyer hiding with her. Dr Stahlberg was a confirmed anti-Nazi, and on hearing my story gave Camilla the handsome present of some ration coupons. Later, Frau Fiochi told me that Hildegard Stahlberg had also given her twenty marks and a packet of cigarettes for me. Camilla spent the money on food, and smoked the cigarettes herself. After the war, she promised, she would pay it all back to me. She also kept the money that Lehmann had given her for me when I cleaned his filthy car that was hidden in the cellar.
To my great delight Lieschen Sabbarth soon came to visit us again. She brought me a bag of sweets, and her kind heart and friendly nature did me good as well. At the weekend Karola Schenk also visited the villa.
I told Lieschen and Karola all about my stay with the rubber director. I was very worried about the way it had ended; I feared that after my sudden departure Galecki might have made inquiries about me. He knew Johanna Koch’s name, and I had also given him her address in Kaulsdorf. She could have been in great danger.
But Karola and Lieschen reassured me. ‘That rubber director of yours would never pursue the matter,’ they said. The man had certainly been glad to find a nice woman, they thought, and then it had gradually dawned on him that there was something odd about my background. When the relationship came to an end without getting him into any trouble, he would simply have let his vague suspicion drop.
Late that evening, Camilla asked me to go to the station with her sister-in-law. I was happy to do so, for I still felt rather fond of Karola. She looked wonderful in her pale mink coat and an expensive velours hat. On the way she linked arms with me, and we nestled close to each other as we walked along. Then she told me about her visit to Heller.
Karola had gone to see the Jewish gynaecologist to put in a good word for me. She had heard from Camilla about the false suspicions cast on me in Zeuthen. It was a difficult step for her to take as a law-abiding citizen who was not known as either an anti-Fascist or an opponent of the Nazis. She was terrified of falling into the hands of the Gestapo when she went to see Heller, unlikely as that might be.
The doctor had just shown a patient out of hi
s consulting room when he saw Karola. He was about to ask her to go into the dining room for a moment, but when he had opened the door and looked inside the room he closed it again. ‘Oh, my God, we can’t talk in there. That’s my second set of patients for the day come to see me.’ At a fleeting glance, Karola had seen only that there was someone sitting on every dining chair, each of the occupants of the chairs, naturally, on a sheet of newspaper.
Here my companion stopped in the street and turned to me. ‘Promise me one thing,’ she said with great urgency. ‘Never go to see Heller as one of his second set of patients for the day. Never!’
‘I can’t promise that. I don’t know what may yet happen to me. But what would be so bad about it?’ I asked.
Then she said a surprising thing. ‘The people sitting on those elegant dining-room chairs, without saying a word to each other, were all of them Jews in hiding.’
‘How could you tell?’
‘I just know. I wouldn’t have taken any of them separately for a Jew, but all together, yes.’ She couldn’t express her meaning any more precisely, but now I knew what she meant.
‘Yes, let’s take the typical caricature of a Jew as it appears in Der Stürmer,’ I said thoughtfully. I was referring to the infamous anti-Semitic weekly newspaper of that name. ‘The Stürmer Jew has an assortment of about ten different characteristics: curly hair, a paunch, flat feet, a huge nose and so on. If someone has all those features, people immediately think: ah, a Jew. But a Jew with only one such characteristic doesn’t stand out in a group of nine Germanic types. Only if you get ten Jews together, each with one such feature, are they unmistakably a Jewish group.’
‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have put it so precisely myself.’ Then she hugged me and held me close. And once again she whispered in my ear, ‘Please remember, never try to get in touch with Jewish groups.’
Inge’s mother also visited Zeuthen one Sunday. Trude Neuke’s first marriage had been to Rudolf Hubbe, a communist functionary in Magdeburg. He had been killed by SA men in April 1933. A little later, so as not to be alone in the world with her two small children, she had married another communist, Julius Neuke.
Trude was a small, plump woman with sturdy legs. Her most striking feature was her fiery red hair. She wore it neatly parted and pinned up into a heavy bun at the nape of her neck.
She greeted me warmly, and we were on familiar terms at once. ‘I’ve already heard about you – you’re Hannchen. Of course that first name is false, and I don’t even want to know your surname. I’m usually called Red Trude, and not just because of my hair. My opinions are redder still,’ she told me. Even at this first meeting I noticed that the corners of her mouth sometimes turned down for several seconds, while she went on talking in a loud and apparently cheerful voice. Then she suddenly looked very melancholy.
The four of us sat drinking ersatz coffee. Inge’s misdemeanours were the main subject of conversation. Trude shouted and raged, and fired off tirades of abuse at her daughter; it wasn’t the first time she’d had trouble with her. ‘You dreadful girl, you dreadful girl!’ she kept saying. ‘Here’s a human being who, sad to say, has to live in hiding, she falls under suspicion on account of your idiocy and the disinformation you spread, and you haven’t cleared that up yet!’ Inge sat there perfectly still and didn’t react at all. Then Trude told her daughter to apologise to me.
The girl got to her feet, came round the table in her blue gymnastics outfit, offered me her hand and yet again, in a tone devoid of any emotion, said, ‘Sorry.’
After that Trude, without exaggeration or excessive emotion, calmly said something that meant a lot to me. ‘From now on, until the victory of the Red Army, I will take responsibility for saving your life from our common enemies.’ She offered me her hand, a small, delicate, ladylike hand that reminded me very much of my mother’s. I took it and held it firmly. I was to feel, later, that this was one of the best moments of my life.
Camilla too sensed that something out of the ordinary had happened. ‘We must drink to that,’ she solemnly declared. She went down to the cellar and brought up the remains of some cherry brandy that she had saved for very special occasions. She divided it out between four tiny liqueur glasses that she took from a glass-fronted cupboard, which also contained various kitschy items and objets d’art.
We stood up and pushed our chairs under the table. Then Camilla Fiochi made a short speech, phrased with surprising clarity. ‘All of us gathered here are Germans, and we all love our Fatherland. But a country that is committing the greatest crimes in human history can’t be called a Fatherland. Let us raise our glasses to the downfall of the Wehrmacht, so that humanity and ultimately Germany can live. We will drink to the victory of the Allies.’
‘Victory and freedom!’ Trude agreed, drinking to us. At the word ‘freedom’, something like a bright spark of life was to be seen in the unfortunate Inge’s face. She too raised her glass to me, and I nodded at her. That was our real reconciliation.
I took Trude Neuke to the station that evening. With a crook of her finger and a nod of her head she directed me, as we parted, to a dark corner of the building, where she bent over to me and whispered in my ear, so quietly that no one else could hear it, ‘Red Front!’
A few days later I told Frau Koch about this first meeting with Trude. That was stupid of me, naturally, for she immediately conceived mortal hatred of the second woman to have said that she would protect me, thus proclaiming herself Frau Koch’s rival.
On 3 February 1943, sitting with Inge Hubbe and Lieschen Sabbarth in Camilla Fiochi’s house, I heard the dramatic radio broadcast announcing the surrender of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. The news had me in a state of excitement greater than any I had known before. It was clear to me that the course of the war was decided, the Allies were going to win, and the history of the world would not be pointless. Humanity, and with it Germany, would be saved from final disaster.
In the middle of this transmission, with the Nazi newsreaders describing the catastrophe, Camilla suddenly said, ‘Oh, my God. My nephew Gunther!’ This nephew of hers, she had suddenly realised, had probably fallen in the ‘kettle’ surrounding Stalingrad.
I reacted to this remark with a totally inappropriate urge to laugh. It may have been the result of my own powerful feelings. I had to run out of the room and shut myself into the bathroom, feeling ashamed of myself for such foolishness. It was some time before I could calm down.
That afternoon Lieschen Sabbarth told me that her father, the anarcho-syndicalist, had been trying hard to find me somewhere to stay. That asthmatic old man, who found walking difficult, had dragged himself laboriously round his old acquaintances. Many of them were no longer alive, he found that many more had gone to live at another address. Often the door was opened to him by careworn women who told him that their husbands had been imprisoned years ago, or taken to a penitentiary or a concentration camp. But unfortunately, she said, his search for shelter for me had not been successful. I was much moved by this story. ‘You can’t imagine,’ I told Lieschen to console her, ‘how much it does for me to know that an old man, a total stranger to me, has spent days on end looking for a place where I could go. And yet he doesn’t even know me.’
Soon after this I left Zeuthen, with many heartfelt thanks. For the second time my stay with Camilla Fiochi was over, and another with Gerda Janicke was agreed. ‘Remember today’s date,’ Frau Fiochi told me. ‘If the war is still on in a year’s time, and if I haven’t hanged myself yet and if you’re still living in hiding, you must come here again and stay for four weeks.’
‘Stay alive,’ I replied, with the casual phrase that so many people used when saying goodbye in wartime.
6
Basically, the Janickes’ apartment in Schierker Strasse consisted of a single room, which was also difficult to heat. Like all other such rooms in this apartment block, it was used as a bedroom; bedroom furniture with a handsome bed frame was the pride and joy of the lower mi
ddle classes of our society. A cupboard for crockery, books and bed linen all combined stood in another, half-sized room. This ice-cold little room also contained a sofa, and that was where I slept.
Instead of the grandmother in need of nursing, who had gone home to Thuringia, there was now another young woman who had gone underground in this tiny apartment. Eva Deutschkron was a few years older than me, and had also been sent to Gerda Janicke by Benno Heller. The two women were in total agreement about everything, including young Jörg, whom I now saw again.
Eva Deutschkron was a trained dressmaker, and sat at the sewing machine all day. She made rompers for the little boy, altered his clothes, and also worked on renovating Frau Janicke’s wardrobe. Eva saw no reason why this needlework should ever come to an end. Her hostess enjoyed having her own personal dressmaker, as Heller put it, to the amusement of both women. ‘You know, your sewing is like the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights,’ I once told Eva.
Our real life was spent in the kitchen. Even this room was never really warm, despite the presence of a coal stove. The two ladies ate their meals there with cute little Jörg, while I watched – or rather, turned away. My mouth was watering, but they didn’t give me anything to eat.
Otherwise, Gerda Janicke sat about on the coal-box unoccupied for most of the time. She was a pretty, rather plump woman, but she let both the corners of her mouth and her shoulders droop. ‘Even her clothes are weeping,’ my grandmother would have said.
My hostess had grown up in very poor circumstances. She had been treated as a child all her life, bossed around first by her horrible parents, whom I had met, then by her husband. She had never been the kind of woman who could give other people instructions. That had changed when I came to stay with her. There was no doubt that she was risking her life for me, but she also enjoyed being in charge for once. ‘You must be available to do housework at any time,’ she told me, for instance, although there wasn’t really much housework to be done. ‘I can’t have you going off to Köpenick all the time to see that friend of yours.’ That meant I didn’t even get the meagre diet that Hannchen Koch saved for me out of her own rations. For days on end I had absolutely nothing to eat, and I was hungrier than I had ever been before.
Underground in Berlin Page 17