Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  I hated Frau Blase as a repellent, criminal blackmailer with Nazi opinions, yet I loved her as a mother figure. Life is complicated.

  Kurt Blase was now twenty-eight years old. He had pale, fair hair, which he wore combed back and held down with pomade or sugar-water, a style typical of the Nazi era. He was always smartly dressed. Even as an adult and the father of a family, he still had a decidedly childlike face, which appeared to be completely empty. ‘If you were to compare his face to a railway station,’ I said to Burgers, ‘you’d have to put up a notice: No Trains In Service.’

  Kurt had met his wife Trudchen in a greengrocer’s shop. The young girl, who was very thin, with curly hair, was weighing out potatoes. Before it was his turn, a woman customer said to Trudchen, ‘What a strong perm you have! The hairdresser must have worked hard over it.’ To which Trudchen replied, ‘I don’t need a perm, it’s all natural. And I never go to the hairdresser. I save the money instead.’

  Kurt, who had never made friends or ventured to approach a girl, thought: a woman who doesn’t need the hairdresser is the right wife for me. He made a date with her, took her to the cinema, took her to the cinema again and married her. They had three children within a short time.

  Now and then the whole family came visiting. The children were out of nappies, but not old enough for school yet. They were pale, undernourished, backward and seemed to have been taught no manners at all. They rampaged noisily round the kitchen. I felt sorry for Frau Blase. Of course she wanted to love her grandchildren, but it wasn’t possible.

  Trudchen herself couldn’t stand her children. She usually sat on the coal-box, smoking. She was probably much the same at home. The first time they came to visit we took part in the ersatz coffee party in the kitchen. The eldest child kept pounding away at his mother’s lap and bellowing, ‘Wanna go home, wanna go home, wanna go home.’ Old Frau Blase’s feelings were hurt. She was sad, and finally mimicked the child’s cry of, ‘Wanna go home, wanna go home.’

  Suddenly Trudchen burst into a fit of lunatic laughter. Her mother-in-law groped her way over to the coal-box, crouched down, put her face so close to her daughter-in-law’s that their noses touched, opened her own toothless mouth and maliciously imitated Trudchen’s laughter. Kurt just sat there defenceless, looking desperate. It was not the way I had imagined an SA man.

  Burgers and I took refuge in our room. A minute later there was a knock on the door: it was Kurt. ‘Can I sit here with you two for a bit?’ he asked. ‘This is more than I can stand.’ We talked easily for a while about everyday subjects, until Kurt and his family left. And we gradually began to make friends with each other.

  3

  When I left Zeuthen, Frau Fiochi had told me I would be welcome to go to her youngest sister Miranda in Kreuzberg some time and darn stockings. I would be warm there, would get something to eat, and into the bargain I would be paid fifty pfennigs an hour – it was all settled. Moreover, Miranda’s husband, Camillo von Weissenfeld, worked in the Ministry of Propaganda. I was horrified, but Frau Fiochi reassured me at once: he would never denounce anyone, she said; he was the best of the whole family.

  So one day I went from Oberbaum to the address on the Kottbusser Damm that I had been given. You wouldn’t have known that Miranda von Weissenfeld had been an artiste and dancer in the past from looking at her now. She had gained a lot of weight, and spoke German very badly. I spent six hours darning a huge mountain of stockings, until the master of the house came home. Camillo von Weissenfeld knew very well who I was, and that embarrassed us both so much that we made clumsy small talk about the weather.

  Then Miranda asked us to clear the stockings away into the bedroom. It was impossible to overlook the booklet entitled How Do I Learn to Speak German Properly? lying on her bedside table. ‘There, you see, you don’t need anything like that even though you’re in such a difficult situation,’ Camillo von Weissenfeld told me, and blushed. Spontaneous understanding sprang up between me and this slender man at a glance. With his attractive white teeth, thin face and huge horn-rimmed glasses, he did not in the least resemble the bloodthirsty enemy whom I would have liked to look in the face just once.

  I got home very late in the evening from this visit. Burgers was back before me, and said it wasn’t worth my while to go to work for that meagre three marks. All the same, I would have liked to go back there and get to know the milieu better, as well as Camillo von Weissenfeld, that member of the ministry headed by Goebbels.

  None the less, I always had plenty to do during the day when Burgers was at work. I was now running the entire household. Simply doing the shopping and bringing it home took a good deal of time. I also resumed my long walks in the city. The area between the Oberbaum bridge and Görlitzer Station, Stralauer Allee and Treptower Park became my new preserve.

  I felt a great need for intellectual activity, and wanted to read something worthwhile at last. So I asked Hannchen Koch to get hold of books for me, preferably from the library of Karl Jalowicz. I had not had any contact with my father’s brother for a long time. It would have been too dangerous. But I knew that he still lived in Pankow, protected from deportation by his marriage to his non-Jewish wife Frieda.

  I was sure there was no trash on Karl’s bookshelves. And as Hannchen Koch was positively keen to be in touch with an educated middle-class Jewish citizen, who in addition was my father’s brother, she happily agreed to my request.

  But after she had brought the third or fourth large tome to the café in Köpenick where we met, she suffered a kind of breakdown. She wept so terribly that everyone there turned to look at us. She was ready to make any sacrifice for me, she sobbed, at the same time holding out the bread she had bought at a black-market price. The worst of it wasn’t carrying the heavy books about. The worst of it was that she mustn’t let Karl know who the books were for, so she had pretended to have discovered a passion for serious literature in herself, and now Karl wanted her to discuss the contents of every book that she brought back to him. It was just too much to ask her to spend her nights reading thick books of a kind to which she was entirely unaccustomed, when she was overburdened with so much else anyway.

  I felt unspeakably embarrassed, and made haste to say that she must stop doing it at once. She dismissed that idea, of course. So I wrote a short piece about each book she was going to return: a few lines giving an opinion on the work as a whole, and saying enough about its content to make any further discussion unnecessary. She could learn those few lines by heart on the tram journey as she took the book back to Pankow, and she conscientiously did so.

  After the war, Karl told me that he had always enjoyed these messages from me. ‘I recognised your literary style at once,’ he said. ‘I knew that those assessments could only be your work.’ But after a few weeks this exchange came to an end, because the journeys to and from Pankow were too much for Frau Koch.

  Trude had another idea. She was an avid user of lending libraries; she simply registered me for one of the branches that she knew and paid the security pledge for me. However, the basic stock of these libraries was light fiction. Better than nothing, I thought, and decided to write a study of some length on that genre of literature. For I soon discovered that even in these cheap novels there were many passages of good writing, where the authors were probably describing experiences from their own lives.

  One day a tattered volume by Theodor Fontane fell into my hands in the library. The spine of the book had been torn off and the last few pages were missing, but all the same I very much wanted to borrow the volume. ‘That’s here by mistake, it’s not been catalogued,’ said the librarian. ‘So you can’t borrow it.’

  ‘All the same, I’d like to read Fontane,’ I protested.

  ‘You know the name of Fontane?’ asked the woman. She sounded distrustful. I was terrified; suppose she called the Gestapo because I seemed to her suspicious?

  ‘I once heard it at school. Is he something special?’ I asked, trying to sound as calm as possible.
Then I returned my last book, but I did not borrow another. I got the librarian to return my pledge, and never set foot in the lending library again.

  So now that source of books had also dried up. Still, I had already begun making notes for my study of popular literature. I wrote them in a handsome, fat exercise book on the best pre-war paper and with a wax-cloth cover; Frau Blase had taken it out of her magic cupboard as a present for me. Under the heading for each book, the name of its author, its title and its year of publication, I sometimes added a tiny letter E, standing for Eigenes, my own, and under it I noted down sayings by Frau Blase, conversations with Jule and Trude Neuke, and everyday observations that I wanted to remember. It was the only time that I dared to put my own experiences and thoughts down on paper.

  Gradually I came to know everyone who lived in the building at 2 Am Oberbaum. Directly below us lived the caretakers, Auguste and Alexander Grass. Grass’s wife was a few years older than him, and with her hair combed high on her head and pinned up in a bun at the nape of her neck, she looked like the figurehead of a barge. Her husband, so Frau Blase whispered to me, had had several convictions in the law courts. As a result, they both hated all authorities and felt much solidarity with me, the girl who had gone to ground. They were friendly people, if not ideal characters, and they were rather unpopular in the neighbourhood.

  Alexander Grass’s old, bedridden mother also lived with them. You never saw her, but an unpleasant, penetrating smell came out of their apartment and there was often shouting. Frau Grass abused her mother-in-law in the most vulgar language, and the neighbours in turn took Frau Grass for a Fury, letting a sick old woman go uncared for. Frau Grass also raged against the Nazis in equally vulgar terms, employing wonderfully graphic expressions.

  The couple naturally addressed everyone in the house by the familiar du pronoun, including Burgers but with the sole exception of me. They always spoke to me formally, with Sie. I was the girl with no name.

  The Knizeks, husband and wife, lived on the first floor. They were delighted when I said, ‘I’m sure you must really be called Knížek, but the little mark over the letter Z has gone missing in German. Am I right?’ The short, stout couple were Czech patriots who had lived in Berlin for many years, running a vegetable stall in the market.

  Their lodger, Herr Kittel, did not fit into this environment. He was an old gentleman, very lonely, very well-groomed, almost excessively polite but extremely reserved. It was a long time before I realised that he too knew about me. From then on he always greeted me with a mischievous smile.

  He was another of my friends and protectors. Although we all tried to keep as much warmth as possible in our rooms, with fuel in such short supply, he slept with his door to the front hall of the apartment open at night, so that he could hear whether anything threatening went on in the building. He was much too good-mannered to mention the fact to me, and I was sure that I would wake up of my own accord anyway and make my escape if I heard any unusual sound.

  But then the caretaker’s wife asked me one morning, ‘What did you think of all that racket last night? Wasn’t it terrible?’ I had slept like a log, and hadn’t heard anything at all. However, two or three drunken soldiers had come into the building, rampaging about, shouting and lying down on the stairs. Herr Kittel had woken at once, greatly concerned for me. He had put on his fireman’s uniform and gone to wake the caretaker. Together, the two men had managed to remove the drunks from the stairs, and had thrown them out of the building so as to protect me.

  The top floor was occupied by Frau Haase, a widow who was so deaf that she heard almost nothing. She simply smiled at everything I said, in a very friendly way, but she showed absolutely no interest in me.

  Kurt Blase came to see his mother regularly. Now and then she sent him to check up on our room, and in doing so he once discovered the fine wires stretched across it.

  Burgers had been given a cigarette packet by a colleague who was an enthusiastic radio amateur, and who had built a crystal receiver into it. However, to receive radio signals we needed some kind of antenna. We had stretched fine wires back and forth across the room for that purpose, and it worked: we could listen to news broadcasts from other countries, although we couldn’t choose the transmitter precisely. And we were very keen to hear news from abroad, because we wanted to know the truth about the way the war was going.

  The best time to listen to the radio was when an air-raid warning had sounded. Then, to quote Jule Neuke, ‘those lying German newsreaders shut up’ and the foreign transmitters could be heard loud and clear. I found it wonderfully exciting to hear the famous chimes of Big Ben over the radio from London. Once I also heard the voice of the German newsreader Walter Hertner, whose real surname was Herz, an actor who belonged to the Jewish Cultural League and had escaped to England. I had been a great fan of this actor before the war, and thought him extremely important.

  My greatest radio experience, however, came one morning when there was an air-raid warning in broad daylight. I simply did not go down to the air-raid shelter, but sat in front of our crystal set. Suddenly I heard a distant voice: Po Yerushalayim (This is Jerusalem). I knocked on the wall above the receiver and cried, ‘Chaverim (comrades), I’m shut up here with an impossible Dutchman in an apartment full of bugs belonging to a Nazi woman called Blase! But I want to live! I’m fighting, I’m doing my best to survive! Shalom, shalom!’ Once again I heard a few scraps of Hebrew coming over the airwaves, but I couldn’t make out whole sentences.

  Of course Kurt understood the significance of those wires, and told his mother. There was another almighty row with Frau Blase, leading to angry words, threats, and finally reconciliation. We kept our radio.

  In late autumn the weather turned damp and cold. When Frau Blase felt the stove in our room one day she realised that it was nice and hot, much hotter than hers. That was because, for one thing, we had a more modern stove, while the stoves in the other two rooms were practically antediluvian. They went right up to the ceiling and had kitschy stucco decoration, but only one opening for the fire, so that the fuel and the ashes mingled, and on account of their inadequate construction they never got really hot. For another thing, the fuel you could buy at the time was de-gassed and had very little heating power.

  However, we ourselves were burning pre-war fuel, and it happened like this. One of Gerrit’s household tasks was to bring up coal. In doing so he had discovered many hundredweight of the very best pre-war coal with a black, greasy gleam stacked by the longer wall of Frau Blase’s cellar. To this day I have no idea where all this fuel came from.

  ‘This building is sure to be bombed sooner or later. Why let all that wonderful peacetime coal go to waste?’ said the Dutchman.

  ‘If you want to bring it up here so that we have a warm room, go ahead,’ I told him. ‘But I’m not taking someone else’s property.’ To me, it was a question of dignity; I didn’t want to sink to the level of the German riff-raff. Burgers had fewer inhibitions.

  Now Frau Blase told Kurt to find out whether, by any chance, we were burning her good pre-war coal. He asked us directly. ‘This will make you laugh, Kurt; yes, we are,’ said Burgers. ‘Those stocks of coal will probably outlast your mother, so why should we freeze?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Kurt thoughtfully. ‘And there am I shivering with cold at home.’ He lived in Thaerstrasse in the Friedrichshain district, in a chilly apartment that couldn’t be kept warm.

  From then on we were in league over the peacetime coal question, and Kurt dropped in almost every day. Before going to see his mother, he knocked at the wall of my room from outside in the stairwell. I quietly opened the door, gave him the cellar key, he went downstairs, packed a briefcase full of coal, hid it somewhere or other, and only then did he ring the bell, visit his mother, and go away again with his loot. These regular visits greatly reinforced our friendship.

  He liked me, and I liked him too. When he raised one eyebrow, as he often did, it always looked as if he were marvelling
at something. And in fact he was, because he was learning the phenomenon of friendship for the first time in his life. Kurt never made remarks of any kind about National Socialism or about the Jews. Why he had become a Nazi and what he had thought about it I preferred not to ask. Thinking wasn’t his strong point anyway.

  Once Kurt Blase got a bonus of 200 or 250 marks for his achievements at work. To him, that was a large sum. He told us that he wasn’t going to let Trudchen know about it; he would do something for his own pleasure for once. Frau Blase was enthusiastic, and clapped her hands with glee; she hated her daughter-in-law like poison, and liked to think of Kurt going behind Trudchen’s back. It turned out, opportunely, that he had gone on a little work-related trip to Frankfurt an der Oder, and on the journey had met two very nice girls. One was a nurse, the other an office worker. He had plucked up the courage to amuse himself with both girls and exchange addresses.

  One of them had a birthday soon afterwards. He wanted to send her flowers, and went to some trouble to get them. His mother recommended him to get me to write a letter to send with them, perhaps in verse. I was happy to do that, and it impressed him greatly, particularly when the girl felt very flattered.

  Kurt spent all the rest of his bonus meeting the two girls and inviting them to all kinds of harmless pleasures. Then he told me that, sad to say, he would have to break off contact with them, because the money had run out.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to make real friends with one of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Get intimate, you mean? Nothing doing,’ he said brusquely. ‘If I get fun out of something, then judging by all I’ve known so far I’d be bound to …’ He didn’t finish his sentence, began stammering, and finally collapsed on my breast in sobs. I had difficulty keeping a straight face, but I pulled myself together. So the two of us sat harmoniously united on the sofa. I put my arm round his neck to console him, and thought, with an echo of Goethe: Happy is he who from the world can take his well-earned rest / without a grudge, while the SA is held against his breast, simply changing the words einen Freund [a friend] to refer to the SA.