FIVE
I was the girl without a name
After 1943: Something Like a Normal Life
1
Trude Neuke called him the crazy Dutchman. Gerrit Burgers was two years older than me, about half a head taller, and really rather good-looking. He was slim, had thick, light brown hair above a high forehead, expressive eyes and a thin face. His crooked teeth were less attractive; his front teeth were speckled with small brown marks. Striking characteristics were his quirks and his strange behaviour.
Out in the street, he always wore a wide-brimmed hat. Although he was slender and well built, he let his upper body lean slightly to the left. He always had a briefcase with him, slinging it round his neck on a strap so that it lay across his chest, bumping with every step he took. ‘An idiot,’ was Trude’s verdict, adding the contradictory comment, ‘And an intelligent man; you can have a good conversation with him.’
She had met Burgers when he went to lodge with her neighbours the Steinbecks. He had come to Berlin as a foreign worker, and judging by what Trude said was being robbed blind by his landlady. They had agreed that she would do his food shopping and cooking, but she kept most of his allotted rations as a manual labourer for herself and her husband. Burgers also had to clean their windows, take out the rubbish and so forth when he came home after a long day’s work. He put up with it because he wasn’t used to anything else; at home in the Netherlands his mother had always bossed him about.
His friendship with Trude and Jule Neuke began when he turned up at their front door in tears one day: Frau Steinbeck had locked him out. Burgers was prone to uncontrolled outbursts of emotion, and that day he poured out his heart to Trude. He had come to Germany voluntarily in search of work, but he was an opponent of the Nazis, so he felt at home in the Neukes’ kitchen. Even after he had moved to lodge with another landlady near the Oberbaum bridge, he regularly dropped in at Schönleinstrasse for a cup of ersatz coffee on a Saturday afternoon.
The Dutchman had never had a girlfriend in his life, because he simply dared not approach women. He had told Frau Steinbeck this before he knew anyone else in Berlin to talk to. She had made fun of him for it, in a mean, nasty way, and of course she had passed the information on to her husband. That had given Herbert Steinbeck the idea of getting him and me together.
Trude was to inform me of this plan, and seemed much embarrassed by it. What she was suggesting to me was by no means a fairy-tale castle set in a beautiful old estate. Clever as she was, however, she was quick to see the advantages of such an arrangement, which would be in the interests of both of us. And I would not owe anyone thanks, she added, in an obvious dig at Hannchen Koch.
When the Dutchman turned up at the Neukes’ apartment for ersatz coffee on the following Saturday afternoon, Trude sent me out of the room at first. A few minutes later she called me back into the kitchen. She hadn’t needed long to explain to Burgers what a chance of sexual liberation he had here. In addition, there was the prospect of a wife to keep house for him without stealing his provisions; his new landlady was no better than Frau Steinbeck there. He showed interest at once.
Trude introduced the man to me in her Berlin accent as ‘Jerrit Burjers’, but I knew how to pronounce his Dutch name properly as I greeted him politely and gave him my hand. I had gone to visit an aunt in Amsterdam on my fourteenth birthday, and had picked up a few scraps of Dutch. An inarticulate cry of delight escaped him, and he opened his mouth wide. Then, clumsily and with his mouth still wide open, he gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was a very wet, slobbering kiss, but it would have been tactless to wipe the saliva away.
He came from Nijmegen, a city on the Dutch border, and had already spoken a mixture of Dutch and German there. By now he had acquired a vocabulary that could be understood by anyone he addressed in Berlin. As Johanna was not my real name, he decided to call me Frauke, meaning ‘little wife’. ‘Frauke, let’s drink up and then we’ll both go home,’ he happily announced.
We went on foot from Schönleinstrasse to the River Spree. I kept my distance from the Dutchman. I found his appearance embarrassing, and I didn’t want either to attract notice or to have the passers by staring at me.
It was not far to the Oberbaum bridge, yet I had never been in this area before. I liked it very much at once. It had the typical atmosphere of Berlin. The Spree was my Spree, my river. I fervently hoped that this might represent a long-term solution for me.
The bridge led straight to a short street on the opposite bank of the Spree, where there were three apartment blocks in a row. We went into the middle one. I immediately felt at ease there, even in the front hall of the building. An old cardboard plate hanging on the banisters proclaimed that they were just polished, and I saw another such notice in the same hand, and like the first with spelling mistakes, informing everyone that when the air-raid warning sounded the cellar doors must be left open. I relished the phonetic reproduction of a genuine Berlin accent on both notices.
We went up the stairs. There was only one door on the first floor, with the name Knizek on it. ‘Just one tenant here?’ I asked Burgers.
‘Yes, this is a narrow house between the two big corner buildings,’ he explained.
‘How nice.’ I was pleased; the fewer neighbours the better.
A small handwritten card indicated that part of this first-floor apartment was occupied by a lodger. It read ‘KiHel’, a name that puzzled me. Later I found out that the man’s name was Kittel, but the two letters T had been crossed very close together and rather too low down, so that they looked like a capital H.
Herr and Frau Grass, the caretakers of the building, lived one floor higher up. Luise Blase, the Dutchman’s landlady, lived on the third floor. There was a fourth floor above that, but we did not go up there until later.
Before we left her apartment, Trude had taken me aside for a moment. ‘I’ve told Burgers that you’re half-Jewish, so you’ve had a lot of trouble and have had to go underground,’ she whispered to me. As it was to turn out, this was a brilliant idea, and was to make my survival in my new environment very much easier. With a cover story like that, I at least half belonged to the people I wanted to accept me into their world; I was not so alien that I must at all costs be kept out of it.
Frau Blase was seventy-eight years old, half blind and – as Burgers had told me on the way – an enthusiastic Nazi supporter. The Dutchman went straight to the point: he told her he had found a woman who was coming to live with him at once. I would keep house for him, and he said I was also ready to lend Frau Blase a hand at any time. Since I was not racially impeccable, it would be better not to register me with the police, he added casually. That didn’t seem to bother the old woman, but she immediately began haggling over the rent with Burgers. She wanted twice the original rent for his room if I was to share his broad wooden bed. The Dutchman thought that was too much, and finally they agreed to split the difference. With that, I moved in, and from the end of April 1943 my address was Number 2 Am Oberbaum.
I had liked the apartment when we first stepped into its roomy entrance hall, which led to the kitchen on the right, and on the left to the large, light front room occupied by Burgers. A connecting door led to a second room that was also rented out. A Pole and a Hungarian woman lived there, with their small child.
It was a few days before I discovered where Frau Blase had her own rooms. At first the way she sometimes just disappeared from the kitchen when I hadn’t seen her in the hall was a mystery to me. Only then did I discover that a narrow door in the kitchen resembling the door of a broom cupboard led to another small hall, leading in its turn into Frau Blase’s bedroom. There was a huge wardrobe in this communicating room. I was not to learn what precious treasures it contained until later.
On the day after I moved in, Frau Blase asked me to go shopping with her. She couldn’t leave the house or carry her purchases on her own. Either her son Kurt or the caretaker’s wife usually went with her.
She put on a good hat
dating from the twenties and a pair of gloves, picked up a handbag and took my arm. She had dressed in her Sunday best for her first outing in a long time, which was also to be the last of her life.
The dairy lay on the opposite bank of the river. She introduced me to the milkman, one Herr Pofahl, as her new lodger. ‘How is your wife?’ she asked him. ‘Not so good,’ he replied briefly. When we had left the shop, Frau Blase told me that Frau Pofahl suffered from severe depression, and had been in an institution several times because of it.
Next time I went shopping on my own. ‘My regards to your landlady,’ said the milkman, ‘and tell her that we’re closing down on the first of next month. I can’t manage any more. My wife is in hospital again.’
Luise Blase was greatly affected by this information. ‘I won’t be going shopping any more,’ she announced, and gave me the ration cards for herself and Burgers, telling me to register them wherever I liked. As she saw it, the closure of the dairy marked the end of a section of her life. Gradually she handed over more and more responsibility for her housekeeping to me.
The first serious quarrel between Burgers and Frau Blase came as a complete surprise to me. The reason for it was ridiculous. The Dutchman had been washing himself thoroughly in the kitchen – as usual, and as I did too. There was in fact a bathroom, but the bath was full of coal.
Our landlady had tactfully withdrawn at first, and didn’t come back into the kitchen until Burgers had finished. But he had accidentally left a boot in the middle of the kitchen floor. Frau Blase, who was almost blind, stumbled over it and got a shock. ‘Only a filthy foreigner can be as slovenly as that,’ she protested angrily. ‘We Germans are neat and tidy!’ Burgers responded loudly and indignantly, because he was deeply hurt. He had such a pronounced passion for cleanliness that he was constantly disinfecting the toilet. And now the two of them were hurling the most vulgar abuse at each other for quite a long time. It was disgusting.
Then the old lady went beetroot red in the face, her lower jaw began to tremble, and she threatened to throw her Dutch lodger out. Even worse, she said she would denounce his ‘Jewish Dulcinea’ (that was me) to the Gestapo so that there’d be an end of me at last. She described exactly how she imagined that end, too, mingling a lust for murder with pornographic notions fit for Der Stürmer. She had never read a book in her life, so where she got her ideas was a mystery. She gave vent to terrible and sexually perverse threats of murder, while he shouted wildly at her, stamping his feet like a small child in a tantrum, tearing his hair and addressing her as ‘Mother’ in loud and sarcastic tones.
My heart was thudding, and I was frightened to death. I wasn’t to know that the quarrel would be made up a few hours later, without a word to explain it. Burgers and Frau Blase hated and loved each other equally.
Our landlady’s attitude to me was no less ambivalent. On the one hand, I was a Jewish girl, and of course you had to be hostile to such people and exploit them. On the other hand, she had chosen me as a substitute for the daughter she had always wanted but never had.
When money came in for her, it was always a cause for celebration. Frau Blase was indeed blackmailing the Dutchman to get a higher rent from him, in return for her tolerating my presence in the apartment. But it wasn’t clear to her that she was gaining only a ridiculously small sum, ten or fifteen marks a month. I had heard rumours that when those who had gone underground suddenly had to spend a night in one of the boarding houses on the Kurfürstendamm, they were now charged about a hundred marks for it. Frau Blase wasn’t making anything like that kind of money.
When those few extra marks came in from Burgers, she would rub her hands, cackling in her ancient voice, and tell me, ‘Here’s money, dear daughter. You go down to the bar and get us a can of beer from Altermann. That’s one in the eye for those Jews, dear daughter. So now there’s money in the house, let’s have a drink.’
She was curious too, of course. For instance, she wanted to know how my father had made his living. I couldn’t say he was a lawyer; to her, the word suggested someone enthroned in the clouds. But it had to be something respectable. When she asked me, I happened to be standing by the big, bricked-in kitchen stove, one corner of which was covered with yellowed newspaper. My eye fell on an advertisement for the services of a house-painter in Köpenick.
‘We had a little shop selling paints and varnishes in Köpenick,’ I said.
‘What was the address?’ asked Frau Blase.
I quickly read out an address from another advertisement. Then she asked me more questions, showing a great interest in paints and varnishes.
Of course I didn’t know the first thing about the subject. So the next time I had a chance, I went into a paint shop in Neukölln and asked the saleswoman a lot of questions about its wares, most of which were not in evidence. ‘Where’s your bombing certificate?’ the elderly woman inquired. She meant a document in official jargon, to the effect that I had been bombed out and thus had permission to buy a given number of rolls of wallpaper or similar goods.
‘I haven’t got one,’ I admitted.
‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ she asked, annoyed.
‘Yes, of course. I just wanted to know what it used to be like.’
‘What’s all this nonsense in aid of?’ The saleswoman lost her temper. ‘No one’s ever tried to annoy me like this before! It ought to be forbidden by the police!’
‘Police’ was a word that immediately choked me with fear. Of course I was over-reacting; the woman was just saying what came into her head, and would certainly not have gone to raise the alarm at once. But to me it was the signal for flight. I quickly said goodbye and left the shop. As soon as I had turned the next corner I ran for all I was worth. I was surprised by my own athletic prowess, for in sports at school I had been at best an average runner.
*
And then, one morning, someone really did ring the front doorbell. Old Frau Blase was still in bed, and Burgers was already at work. I told myself: if for some reason or other I’ve been denounced, it makes no difference who lets the Gestapo in. I’m here and they’ll find me anyway. So I opened the door. There were indeed two police officers outside, with a warrant to search the place, but they weren’t interested in me. It was about the Polish and Hungarian couple.
This wasn’t the first time the police had come on account of those two. The man was considered work-shy, which in those days was a crime that could get you sent to a concentration camp or even sentenced to death. The officers took him, the woman and the child away, and the three of them never came back to the apartment.
I must admit that I was relieved. The couple had been curious about me, and suspicious, and had made themselves at home in the kitchen in an unbearable way. The child had cried a lot. We could never all have got along together in that apartment for long. At the time I hardly even thought about the family’s ultimate fate.
After this incident Frau Blase said she really didn’t want the police visiting her apartment, and she was never going to rent to such ‘dirty foreigners’ again. I was welcome to move into the empty room, she added, but she would need money for it. Burgers offered to pay a few more marks if she promised him to let the room stand empty. She shook hands on the deal at once.
The next explosion between Burgers and Frau Blase was because of the various bugs that infested the entire apartment. The Dutchman had already warned me about this problem when we were first on our way there over the Oberbaum bridge. Whole districts of the poorer parts of Berlin were plagued by insects, and at that time there was no really effective way to get rid of them. All three apartment blocks would have had to be cleared and then filled with gas to destroy the pests, because if only a few of them were killed the survivors would emigrate into the neighbourhood through cracks in the walls and would soon be back.
Burgers had tried putting the bugs down with disinfectant, but not very successfully. You couldn’t even reduce their numbers; on the contrary, they increased and multipli
ed. Finally he took off one of his slippers and squashed them against the wall with it.
Frau Blase’s son often came to see her, and she told him to inspect our room. Kurt Blase was an SA man, and a believer in the final victory. He was a textbook Nazi. He saw the bloodstains on our wall and reported them to his mother, who immediately kicked up a fuss. Instead of apologising for the bug infestation and lowering the rent, she wanted financial compensation for the marks on the wall. Once again she called Burgers a ‘filthy foreigner’. Once again there were furious scenes, and I was terrified. But after a few hours it all passed over, nothing much was said about the row, and an odd sort of harmony set in.
When a similar scene threatened on another occasion, I went straight into the kitchen and talked to the old lady. ‘Gerrit was going to clean your windows tomorrow. What with the air raids there isn’t a window cleaner left in the whole of Berlin, but please don’t make a fuss about it, you’ll do yourself no good.’ And I told Burgers, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! It’s getting harder and harder to find a place to live in Berlin, and we’ve been lucky here. It’s not worth quarrelling with the old woman at her great age. She’s really very fond of you, you know.’ And I took his hand, led him into the kitchen, and that was the end of it.
However, soon Burgers and I had our own first real, violent quarrel, and just because I was reading a light novel that Trude had lent me. The book was lying open on the desk in Burgers’s room. He had finished work for the day, and we were sitting on the sofa. But I found talking to him terribly boring, so I kept getting up and taking a few steps over to the desk to go on reading my novel, which was no great work of literature but was very exciting.
‘You’re not to read when I’m at home,’ he grumbled, at first mildly enough, but then sounding annoyed and then shouting. ‘You’re supposed to be here just for me.’ I obeyed his instructions for a few minutes, and then went on reading from where I was on the sofa, quite a way from my book. When he noticed what I was doing, he felt so irate that he took off one of his boots and hit me on the head with it.
Underground in Berlin Page 22