Underground in Berlin

by Marie Jalowicz Simon

  A few days later I had a very unpleasant experience. I was wearing a winter coat that didn’t fit me properly, an ugly garment that I had inherited. I tried to make up for its shortcomings by belting it in round the waist. I also usually slipped my shoes on barefoot, since I had no stockings. I would have needed clothing coupons to buy some, and I had none of those either. That day a woman stared at me in the street and then let fly. ‘Ha, ha, ha – I never saw the likes of that before! Ever such an elegant coat –’ she didn’t mean that ironically – ‘and no stockings!’ She cocked a snook at me, and when I swiftly turned and walked away, feeling afraid of her, she followed that up with a torrent of abuse. Once again I felt unhappy with my decision to class myself with the poor, oppressed and exploited, or in Christian terminology those who labour and are heavy laden. I just didn’t like the company.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Kurt, when I told him about this scene. He hurried off to his mother and came back a few minutes later, beaming, with her card of clothing coupons. ‘I told Mother that I’d like to give those two ladies stockings, and if Trudchen knew she’d explode with rage.’ He opened his wallet and gave me not only the card of clothing coupons but also money to buy stockings. I was truly moved. And Frau Blase was delighted about anything that was withheld from her daughter-in-law.

  That also applied to the cigarettes that Trudchen chain-smoked. As neither Kurt nor Frau Blase smoked, she consumed their entire rations. It drove her mother-in-law to distraction. One day I heard her in the kitchen, coughing and making inarticulate sounds: at the age of seventy-eight, and after all the setbacks she had known, Frau Blase was smoking the first cigarette of her life. She hoped that she might yet become a smoker and thus use up her whole tobacco ration by herself.

  4

  In the winter of 1943–1944, Frau Blase fell severely ill. First she had a bad chill, then she caught a cough as well, and she stayed in bed all day. She did come into the kitchen to wash, she went to the toilet, and she also made herself something to eat. She didn’t want me to look after her; she was well-disciplined and refused to spare herself, to the point of obstinacy.

  But then her condition deteriorated. She ran a high temperature, wheezed as she breathed, was unsteady on her feet and had to hold on to the kitchen stove to keep from falling over. Several times I suggested fetching a doctor, although that was a near-impossibility, because most doctors were in the field with the armed forces. She refused. ‘I can die without doctors, but I don’t want to die and I’m not going to,’ she announced.

  One day, when I was busy in the kitchen, I heard cries for help. Of course the magic door was closed, but out of a presentiment that she might need someone she had left her bedroom door wide open, and in her feverish state, she had fallen out of bed and lost her sense of direction. With great difficulty I lifted her, put my arms round her and got her back into bed. I had never been in her bedroom before. Then I brought her a cup of tea.

  She was over the worst of it now. Her temperature gradually came down, but she would never be really well again. Within a few weeks she seemed to age ten years. She was a case for nursing now, she had to lie down a great deal, and never came out of her bedroom before eleven in the morning again.

  But the weaker Luise Blase was, the easier my own situation became: I was now solely responsible for the housekeeping, and I took the best care I could of the old lady, in need of nursing as she was. That way she could stay in her familiar surroundings and keep her independence. She was deeply grateful to me for that, and so was Kurt. Now and then she gave me one of those wonderful soaps or shampoos from her cupboard; the mere perfume of them was a joy to me.

  The Oberbaum bridge on a historic postcard. To the right of the picture, the apartment block 1 to 3 Am Oberbaum. Number 2, the middle building, is where Marie Jalowicz lived in Luise Blase’s apartment from 1943 to 1945.

  It was absurd: here was I, going into hiding with a Nazi blackmailer who lavished consumer goods on me, luxuries that even the most privileged members of society could hardly hope for. When I was alone in the kitchen in the morning, I would fill the wash tub with water, put it over two gas rings and then manoeuvre it over to two chairs placed opposite each other. Then I took a real hip bath, splashing the water about and singing. Sometimes I felt so happy in that apartment that I hardly know how to express it.

  The situation with the Kochs was also rather easier now. Emil, who by this time was over forty and extremely short sighted, had been moved to another barracks, where they asked him what job he used to do. He replied, as most people who were quick off the mark did at the time, by saying that he had been a cook. He had no idea how to prepare food, but his wife quickly taught him some of the basics.

  From now on, Emil had access to considerable quantities of food. Hannchen made him a kind of wax-cloth vest to be worn under his clothes: an undergarment equipped with artificial kangaroo pouches. When, as was often the case, there was meat loaf or meatballs for the firefighters, she sacrificed their white bread coupons so that he could bulk out the minced meat to make it go further. He brought the stuff home by the kilo in those wax-cloth bags fitted to his body. He also regularly brought whole rye loaves back for us. I didn’t have to listen to comments about the high price that a black-market loaf had cost me any more.

  And now Hannchen Koch revealed to her husband what he had already worked out for himself anyway: I wasn’t in Bulgaria, and my visit to that country had been a long time ago; I was back in Berlin. I had slept that one night in the Kochs’ marital bed in their little wooden house in Kaulsdorf after my return. Emil Koch had found a hairpin of mine there, and made his own deductions.

  One day, when I was sitting with Hannchen Koch in the Köpenick café, Emil suddenly came in. We greeted one another warmly, and after that we all three of us sometimes met there. He would buy me a glass of wartime beer and one or two cigarettes, but he never made me feel that I owed him eternal gratitude.

  I was still getting pocket money of five marks a week from Hannchen Koch, and that did weigh on my mind. She earned less than a hundred marks a month, so it was really difficult for her to spare such a sum. And she went on telling me, at frequent intervals and in an affected tone of voice, ‘I’m naturally given to self-sacrifice.’

  I kept house as well as possible with the food available to us. No one starved, but our diet was often terribly monotonous, and short of vitamins. Frau Blase was all the happier with anything special that I could get hold of. For instance, you couldn’t get salt and mustard on a ration card; you had to be known in the shop to buy such things, but I didn’t want to be on very friendly terms with the shopkeepers in case they started asking me personal questions.

  So I devised my own ways and means. Once, shopping in a greengrocer’s, I had been given fifty pfennigs too much change. I didn’t notice until I got home; fifty pfennigs wasn’t much, and money had no real purchasing power anyway. But I wanted to be honest, so I went back to the shop next day to return the money. The saleswoman was really touched to find that in wartime, when everything was so coarse and brutalised, there were still honourable people around.

  Then I tried the same thing in several other shops. I would go in and say, ‘I bought something here two weeks ago, and you gave me fifty pfennigs too much change. I haven’t been around here again until today, but now I’d like to give it back.’ The reaction was always one of pleasure and respect, and in that way, for instance, I came by three little packets of fruit paste off the ration, available only under the counter. Burgers was delighted, Frau Blase enchanted, and I gave Hannchen Koch the third packet.

  Once I also went to the Rigaer Strasse indoor market in Friedrichshain. Frau Blase had once worked as a cleaner for a married couple who had a butcher’s stall there. ‘Look in on them and give them my regards,’ she told me. To my surprise, after we had chatted for a little while she gave me a large ring of blood sausage for my landlady off the ration, and two small blood sausages ‘for you and the Dutchman’.


  I was taken aback. ‘How do you know about me?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious who you are. Kurt lives hereabouts, and he told me what a tough time you’re having.’ So people didn’t keep themselves to themselves as much as I’d thought, but my luck held, and no one denounced me.

  As usual when I had a message for Frau Blase, she was delighted to think that, as she put it, I’d been in touch with someone who knew her. In this cheerful mood, she told me that the butcher and his wife had always thought her very honest, but every time she went to work for them she had abstracted meat or sausage from the market stall under their very noses. That was her speciality.

  You had to queue for a very long time, on average an hour, to make every purchase. For me it was twice that time, because for safety’s sake I had registered the ration cards of Burgers and Frau Blase in different shops, in case some inquisitive shop assistant asked, ‘Is your surname Burgers or Blase, and who’s the other one?’

  You were really supposed to enter your first name on the ration card as well, but I had put only an initial: G. Burgers.

  ‘Shall I guess your name?’ a salesgirl once asked me. ‘Gerda!’

  ‘Quite right!’ I said, beaming at her. She filled in the name on the card, so from then on I was Gerda Burgers in that shop.

  Waiting in line, I was quite often asked to change places temporarily when a couple of acquaintances wanted to talk to each other. That was how I got to know a pleasant woman who looked as if she were in her forties. This Frau Rose was telling her friend about her very old mother who needed nursing, and as the friend was very hard of hearing she had to raise her voice. So I learned that Frau Rose was always short of washing powder, because she had to re-bandage her mother’s leg ulcers so often and change her sheets several times a day.

  This was a case where I could be helpful. Frau Koch had given me a whole handful of crumpled coupons for wartime soap and washing powder. They came from customers at the laundry, and she should really have stuck them on their cards, but she didn’t want the extra work. However, she couldn’t exchange the coupons for anything, because it would have been obvious where they came from. So I went up to the woman in the queue, apologised politely for overhearing her conversation, and offered her soap coupons if she had anything to exchange for them.

  ‘I have plenty of food rations, that’s no problem,’ she said. ‘My mother hardly eats anything now. I can offer you bread coupons.’ Then she told me her address, in a road off Stralauer Allee, and said that as a former dentist’s receptionist she set great store by hygiene, adding, with a pause for effect, that she came from Tempelhof. I didn’t know at once how I was supposed to react to this information, but then I made her a little bow, which turned out to be just the right thing: Tempelhof was a good residential area.

  From then on I went to visit Frau Rose about every ten days. We exchanged coupons, and talked for a little while. I heard all about her mother’s state of health on every occasion, and fortunately seldom had to say much myself. It was rather surprising, then, that one day, as she went to the door with me, she said, ‘You know, I don’t think our acquaintanceship can be called that any more; I’d say it’s a friendship.’

  We had so much bread available now that when Gerrit and I went to see the Neukes as usual every Saturday, we could take half a loaf with us as a present to our hosts. Finally, the Dutchman told me, ‘You can cancel the order for bread.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Tell your friend she doesn’t need to give you bread any more. We have plenty.’

  That remark showed that Burgers realised what a strain my relationship with Frau Koch had become. I wouldn’t have credited him with such perspicacity.

  It was extraordinarily interesting to listen to conversations in those long queues, where I learned a great deal about the political mood of the times. Once a discussion programme about Jews came yakking over the radio in a ground-floor apartment. A woman in the queue said, in quite a loud voice, ‘As if we hadn’t heard enough about that by now! They repeat it year after year. Goebbels said the Jews have all gone, so why don’t they tell us when we’ll be able to get smoked fish again and when the bombing will stop?’ Everyone agreed with her.

  On another occasion I heard two women talking about the Rosenstrasse demonstration of February 1943 by Aryans with Jews in their families, mainly women whose Jewish husbands and other relations had been interned in the Rosenstrasse community centre. That was over a year ago now. One woman said to another, ‘Your cousin was there, wasn’t she? Did you go too? What was it like?’

  ‘Yes, I was there, and we called out, “Let our husbands go free!” They weren’t going to shoot German women down there in the city centre, and finally they did let the men out.’

  ‘Oh, I’m glad to hear that. If I’d known in time I’d have gone along too.’

  ‘A lot of people did, just to show solidarity,’ said her acquaintance.

  But most of the women waiting in those long queues were complaining, for instance about the tiny amount of the fat ration, and the fact that everything else they really wanted to eat – especially fruit and vegetables – had disappeared from the shops. Even fully Aryan people in employment were undernourished. Well, I thought to myself, if you wanted to live normal lives, you shouldn’t have elected Hitler and conjured up a war.

  Once I spent four hours queuing in the freezing cold for horsemeat, which was a delicacy in wartime. The meat didn’t come from tired old nags but from good horses that had died as the result of enemy action, and were now being sold for meat.

  My legs already felt like lumps of ice, when a girl who had arrived long before me came out of the horse butcher’s with her shopping and walked past the queue. Suddenly she stopped in front of me. She had recognised me, and I too now remembered seeing her from time to time in the synagogue yard. ‘Hey, I know you! In the same boat, aren’t we?’ she said pertly. I unobtrusively nodded.

  ‘So you’re from a kosher household,’ she went on, keeping her voice very low now, ‘but all the same you’re buying meat from the horse butcher?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve decided that if you look at horsemeat in the right frame of mind it’s strictly kosher.* And at this moment I’m the supreme rabbinical authority.’ Then I had to laugh.

  I was in luck that day. So much meat had been delivered that four times the normal amount of the meat ration on your card had been allotted. Instead of 500 grams of meat you got two kilos, and also marrowbones that made wonderful broth. Because the sale of the horsemeat had been announced in advance, I had three meat ration cards with me, from Frau Koch, from Burgers and from Frau Blase. They were all pleased and grateful, and praised me to the skies.

  That wasn’t the first time I had met people who, like me, had gone underground. When I saw someone in the street whom I knew from the old days, we usually made swift eye contact agreeing not to show it. Later I counted these meetings, and in all I had met twenty-two other people in the same situation as me.

  The most important of them was Fritz Goldberg. He was the son of our former landlord’s family in Landsberger Strasse, and was already over thirty. When we were lodging at his parents’ house I didn’t have much to do with him. However, when I ran into him at the Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn station, it was as if I were meeting a fellow countryman in the desert. From that moment on we were friends.

  He was living with his fiancée Ruth Lachotzke in the back room of a dairy. At the time I had the impression that all Jews living illegally in Berlin were lodging in dairies. Fritz Goldberg was in touch with various small groups of those who had gone underground, and he told me where they met. At our very first meeting he asked me if I wouldn’t like to belong to one of the fabulous barter exchanges.

  ‘I don’t have anything to barter or anything to sell,’ I said, ‘and I’d rather not be in touch with those circles. I’d be breaking all the rules of conspiracy.’

  Fritz was aware of the danger. He k
new the names of several Jewish informers such as Stella Goldschlag, called ‘the blonde ghost’, and Rolf Isaaksohn. He also told me about Ruth Danziger, daughter of the managers of Danziger’s Diner. It was from him that I first heard the expression Greifer, literally ‘gripper’, for a police detective.

  These informers frequented places where they could meet Jews who had gone to ground. Those who still had money might spend their evenings in such places as the State Opera House, and not a few of them were turned in at the end of the performance by informers waiting for them outside the entrance.

  ‘Are you living near here?’ Fritz Goldberg asked with interest.

  ‘Yes, not far away,’ I said.

  ‘Where exactly?’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  I wasn’t going to tell him. When we parted, I acted as if I were going the wrong way on purpose. I ostentatiously made for the building where in fact I really was living, but I gave him a conspiratorial grin; I wanted him to think that I was deceiving him and that was certainly not where I lived.

  After that we crossed each other’s path by chance now and then at the same U-Bahn station. If we had time we went for a walk in Treptower Park and sat on a bench there. As everyone was supposed to work, we had to be careful not to arouse suspicion. If someone passed we pretended to be lovers, leaned close together and smiled at each other. An old lady might give us a friendly nod.

  Once, by chance, I went into the shop at the back of which he was living. As I was handing a new ration card over the counter to have it registered, the salesgirl pinched my hand. Only now did I recognise his fiancée, Ruth Lachotzke. I quickly withdrew the card, because I didn’t want her to see the address, or the names Blase and Burgers. ‘I just looked in to say hello,’ I said, and left.