I knew that the relationship between the two of them was very difficult. Fritz clung to the girl because she gave him a sense of security. She was a blue-eyed blonde, as non-Jewish as you can imagine. But the two of them used to quarrel all night. Their mutual anger and hatred were enough to outweigh caution, and they stopped thinking about the neighbours. He said she was so demanding that she sent him crazy, always wanting him to get hold of butter somewhere instead of margarine.
As a forced labourer, Fritz had worked with the refuse collectors, and had a colleague among them who could indeed get hold of butter. But when he turned up at the refuse tip, the man warned him off. ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re the one with the star. Better not come back here, there are Nazis around.’ It was sheer madness that he did show his face there again, several times. Finally someone recognised the Jew who didn’t wear a Jewish star in the yard, the Gestapo were called in, and that was the end of him.
Fritz Goldberg had literally sought his own death. I heard about it from Ruth Lachotzke. A few days after his arrest, I met her in the street during the midday break. ‘They nabbed Fritz,’ she told me. ‘It’s all very sad, but as far as I’m concerned they can torture him as long as they like.’ Seeing the horror in my face, she went on, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Of course I cried my eyes out. All I mean is that he would never say that he was living with me, or where to find me.’
The loss of Fritz Goldberg as someone to talk to was very sad for me. He had given me important information, and I had been able to exchange ideas with him, as the only person I knew from my former world, about my situation and my fears and concerns.
Now I could only hold fast to the Jewish tradition. I don’t know what will become of the Jews in the USA or Palestine, I said to myself, but I’m here, I’m a minyan* in myself, I am all Israel and I’ll do my duty. After that, I gave the park bench where Fritz and I often used to sit the name of Weissensee,† and for a long time I went there regularly to say the Kaddish. I wanted Fritz Goldberg to have a proper Jewish memorial.
Gerrit Burgers meant nothing to me really, yet he was gradually becoming a familiar figure in my life. If he wasn’t in the middle of one of his fits of rage, he could be very pleasant, attentive and considerate.
We always had plenty to talk about. When he came home from work he told me what he had been doing, and on a day when there had been an air-raid warning we exchanged accounts of how and where we had spent the time.
Every day I bought the Berliner Süden newspaper, and Burgers brought the weekly Das Reich home. He took a great interest in politics, and had become something of an armchair strategist about the way the war was going. We had cut maps out of the newspapers. Gerrit marked out the fronts with pins, and we put our own interpretation on every new development. We read Das Reich aloud to each other and discussed what it said. He was well informed about geography, and could assess any piece of information at once. In addition he liked solving crossword puzzles, and was good at them; he could identify all the tributaries of any obscure African river, and all the operetta characters whose names consisted of four, five or eight letters. He had never heard the operettas themselves.
When the all clear sounded after an air-raid warning, Gerrit and I often went out into the streets. My thoughts were so graphic that I had to be careful not to say them out loud. So I developed my own ritual for the situation: while we saw the red firelight on the horizon, I sang in my head, to the tune of the Horst Wessel song, ‘Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête’ [‘He Who Sows the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind’], a line that I had liked very much in my schooldays.
To me, these raids meant not defeat but victory. I’d have liked to tell the bombers, ‘Keep going. This war could have been avoided, so let anyone who voted for Hitler feel the consequences.’
Now and then we also went to the cinema at the weekend, not of course to the palatial picture-houses of the west of Berlin, showing premières of films, but to the fleapits of Neukölln or the Görlitzer Bahnhof. When, towards the end of the war, Marika Rökk sang the sentimental song ‘Im Leben geht alles vorüber’ [‘Everything Passes Over’], I thought: now they’re really in a stew!
At that time, anyone who wanted could hear the language of slaves and the special kind of humour developed by people living under a dictatorship. I realised that one day when I was walking down Adalbertstrasse in Kreuzberg. I liked that street, with its enormous number of back yards; to me, it was the quintessence of a proletarian residential area.
On a blazing hot August day in 1944, I saw a few passers by gathering outside a small bakery there and laughing. I approached with caution, something always to be recommended on such occasions. A cake with the wording Happy New Year carefully piped on it in icing had been placed in the display window on this sweltering day in high summer. A cardboard notice beside it explained that this was the sample work produced by an apprentice hoping to qualify as a journeyman baker, and another notice explained tersely: ‘Dummy’.
In the circumstances of the time, this amounted to a political statement – and an anti-war statement at that: no one could make a genuine cake topped with genuine icing sugar for want of the ingredients. It was, as expressly stated, a dummy or mock-up of a cake, and the comment suggested ‘Happy New Year – in this heat?’
‘Ooh, that’s a good one, that is,’ said an old lady. ‘That’s a real laugh.’
A few days later, I saw a crowd forming outside the same bakery again. A uniformed police officer broke it up and then went away. I stayed at a safe distance, and only afterwards did I go up to the shop and asked a woman coming out of it, ‘What’s been going on here?’
‘The police wanted that cake and the two notices taken out of the window.’
‘What’s it to do with the police?’
‘They said there were reasons, but they weren’t allowed to discuss them because they could be misunderstood.’
Also in Adalbertstrasse, I saw another incident that made an even more lasting impression on me. A very long line of soldiers, like an army-worm, was winding its way along the street, singing. The repertory of its songs was always the same, and as so often the folksong ‘Dark Brown Is the Hazel Nut’ rang out. When I walked along beside a column on the march like that, I took great care not to keep time with the marching men, but it was difficult not to; the rhythm practically forced itself on you.
Suddenly I saw a decrepit old gentleman marching along beside the soldiers, doing the goose-step. He must once have been a singer, because he had a good voice and articulated the words very well. He wore a bowler hat, a red handkerchief peeked out of his coat pocket, and he was the kind of eccentric you don’t often see at large.
This man was simulating the trumpet prelude to the Radetzky March in a very loud voice, and then he followed up the melody, in stentorian tones, by singing, ‘So put your hand right up my arse, and I’ll give you the Radetzky March.’ Hundreds of soldiers stopped singing and laughed. And I marched along with them like a good girl, deliberately keeping time with the rhythm set by the old man singing his Radetzky March song.
I can’t describe the fun of it all: the cacophony of the performance, discords from the idiotic song about the dark brown hazelnut mingling with the demand to ‘put your hand right up my arse’. I loved the disharmony which, to me, expressed the essence of resistance.
I remembered the experience for a long time: the way a single decrepit old man, with a cord round his waist instead of a belt, had brought hundreds of soldiers to a halt, and nothing terrible had happened to him. I wondered: what might a properly organised resistance still do even now, when the war couldn’t last much longer?
It’s worth it, I thought. It’s worth not marching in time. And it’s been worth facing all the fear and unpleasantness. Because life is beautiful.
5
Our caretaker Grass was a gifted comic. And since the Nazis had no sense of humour – dictators never do – almost everything that could raise a go
od laugh was to do with resistance.
I was walking towards the Oberbaum bridge late one afternoon, a few steps behind Alexander Grass, when the local ‘Golden Pheasant’, as we called certain Nazi officials, came towards us. Grass suddenly began moving as if he had no backbone, raising his arm to the Golden Pheasant in the Hitler salute and at the same time, wriggling like an eel, bowing to him, while he came out with a verbal mishmash somewhere between ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘Good evening, sir!’ The Golden Pheasant roared with laughter and, influenced by the power of suggestion, responded with equally idiotic jabbering. I laughed at that for a long time in retrospect.
It was a very good thing for me that Herr and Frau Grass were also in charge of the air-raid shelter in the cellar. With the aim of keeping everyone in uniform at a distance, Grass had even volunteered his services as assistant air-raid warden. There was not, in reality, any such post, or at least not officially. But he had made it clear to the real air-raid warden that people had to stick together in hard times, and he was therefore prepared to take full responsibility for the apartments at numbers 1 to 3 Am Oberbaum. He would make sure that everyone, including the old folk, got down to the cellar when the air-raid warning sounded. And after the all clear, he would check to see whether an incendiary bomb had fallen anywhere. He did all that just so that I could use the air-raid shelter safely. If a uniformed man did happen to look in, Grass was there at once, claiming all his attention and chatting away to him until he left again.
The inhabitants of all three buildings sat together in one large cellar that was the air-raid shelter. Many of them had brought their own chairs, others perched on the primitive benches that Herr Grass had made. Whenever the alarm went off, people brought their emergency kits with them. Stout Frau Grass stood in the middle of the room looking rather self-important as she showed everyone to their places; they all knew where to go anyway.
The young people sat together in a corner. Here we regularly met Grete Grass, the caretakers’ daughter, who was an assistant in a food shop. Then there was a girl juggler who lodged in one of the buildings next to ours. She suffered from chronic conjunctivitis, and was being treated by the ophthalmologist Dr Martha Jun, who was well known as an anti-Fascist and a staunch opponent of the Nazis. The young performer told me once that she knew exactly who I was; an apprentice of the Kaufhold troupe in Zeuthen had told her about me. So there was a great deal of interested gossip, even though – or perhaps because – Frau Fiochi had tried to make a great secret of my origin. It is really astonishing that no one ever denounced me.
Another of the young people was Lotte, a prostitute who cheerfully admitted to her profession. I had a reliable protector in this vehement anti-Nazi. She would talk frankly and in the most ribald Berlin dialect about her work as a tart, using all the professional jargon of her trade. The average model would have been envious of Lotte’s figure. Men called out Beene wie Marlene, after her, legs like Marlene’s. But she had a huge conk of a nose, and jagged at that. It bent once sharply to the left and then sharply to the right. Lotte was always cracking jokes, and not just about her nose. Everyone roared, screeched, rolled in the aisles with laughter when she began talking. If I had a prize for brilliant comedy to award, I’d be hard put to it to decide between Alexander Grass and Lotte the whore. For a while I tried linking the two of them together in a double act, which I thought would be terrific, but it didn’t work. They simply didn’t interact with each other, and at the most exchanged banalities.
‘Yours is really an excellent profession,’ I once told Lotte, to show how much I liked her.
‘But it wouldn’t do for you if you survive,’ she replied. ‘I guess you’ll study and get a “Doctor” in front of your name. That’s your way, and mine is mine.’
Once, when I was climbing the stairs to our apartment, I heard a lot of noise in the attic. I was immediately terrified: was it the Gestapo? Nonsense, I told myself at once. If I were denounced they wouldn’t be setting to work with hammers and pickaxes in the attic. But I had to persuade myself firmly of that to get my fear under control.
The same evening Alexander Grass told me what had in fact been going on up there: a gang of construction workers had been breaking through the thick firewalls between the separate buildings, so that people could get from one attic to another.
There had been similar openings in the cellar for a long time. If access to one cellar was blocked by rubble, then we would be able to get out into the open through another. Now our assistant air-raid warden had persuaded the man who was really responsible, the official air-raid warden, to do something like it in the attic storey. When he told us about their conversation, Burgers and I laughed out loud. ‘You see, comrade, you have to think logically,’ Grass had told the man. ‘Where will people run to? If they’ve run down from upstairs to get away from the bombs, and then the bombs fall, they’ll have to run up from downstairs again.’ Grass had bombarded the air-raid warden with this nonsense at top speed, twisting and turning like an eel, until the man was worn down and agreed.
And our caretaker had done it especially for me. ‘If the danger comes from downstairs, from the lowest riff-raff ever known, and that’s the Nazis, you don’t want to run down, you want to run up. Because there’s usually one of them still standing outside the door. Then you can get into another building by way of the attics, and leave again in another street,’ he explained. When I tried to thank him, he would have none of it. ‘No need for you to thank anyone. On the contrary. What’s been done to you and your people is monstrous. It’s you we have to thank if we can help you.’
In the evening Lotte went fishing for customers in Altermann’s bar in Mühlenstrasse just round the corner. I had to go there now and then myself. When Frau Blase was in a good temper she would hand me a green glass jug with a patent lid on it and send me to fetch draught beer from the cask. I didn’t like the bar, or the wartime beer either. In addition I was afraid of losing control of myself if I drank alcohol; I wanted to be wide awake all the time with my mind clear. So I developed ways of quietly tipping the beer from the big jug down the kitchen sink without letting Frau Blase notice.
Once she asked me to give her regards to Altermann. ‘Lads,’ announced the landlord in a loud voice, ‘any of you lot remember Full Bladder?’* A few old soaks who were drunk even in the afternoon explained to the others where the nickname came from. It was because she used to drink beer without stopping. There was much noisy shouting in the bar, and then one of the old soaks went from table to table, whispering something that had the drinkers in an uproar again.
Later, I learned what sensational news he had been spreading. Frau Blase often talked about the long and difficult time she had spent away from home, and how terribly sorry she had been for her dear children. It was some time before she admitted that she had been in a women’s prison for a while, because she had been procuring prostitutes for Altermann, to improve her small pension and her earnings when she went out cleaning.
She had been found out only because she also tried to blackmail the elder of her two half-sisters, Klara Kalliwoda, whom she hated. Klara had risen to some prosperity working as a midwife in Wedding; she had scraped together the money, as we said in Berlin, by performing illegal abortions. When Frau Blase threatened to report her to the police if she didn’t pay a certain sum, Klara Kalliwoda engaged a private detective. He quickly found out what criminal activities Luise Blase herself had been pursuing at Altermann’s bar. And so in the end she was the one facing a judge.
Incidentally, Frau Blase spoke of her blackmail of her half-sister without the slightest moral scruples. She thought it no more than her right, while of course Klara, who had hired a detective to get Luise out of her way, was the nastiest creature in the world.
At first we laboriously took Frau Blase down to the cellar every time there was an air raid. But soon she said she wouldn’t bother, because it was too much of a strain for her. That was a great relief for us. Burgers had enough to do getti
ng our air raid kits down to the cellar, two cases in each hand, and I myself was busy taking old people’s cases and helping them down the cellar stairs. There were hardly any able-bodied men in the building, and everyone agreed that the young lady (me) was so kind.
Once, when a bomb was dropped close to us, all the window panes broke. Burgers and I spent a whole Sunday standing out in the yard, in sunny weather, removing splinters from the frames, a horrible job. But the windows couldn’t be reglazed unless all the splinters were gone. The old folk wanted to pay us for doing it, but luckily Burgers and I agreed that we weren’t going to accept any money. Our neighbours were moved to tears to think that there were good-natured people around.
None of these neighbours of ours ever denounced me, but they were not opponents of the Nazis, let alone anti-Fascists in general. Some of them might well have reported an elderly man weighing 150 kilos who looked as they imagined a rich Jew would. I was never sure.
Once, when I came back from a long, refreshing walk, I found a strange woman in our kitchen. I disliked her at first sight. She was vulgar and primitive, dressed from head to foot in various shades of red. She was introduced to me as the new tenant of our empty room.
This woman, I discovered, wanted to be near her husband, an anti-aircraft gunner. One of those guns was mounted on a roof close to our building. I could see when the gunners had an approaching aircraft in their sights, and I felt like calling out to the British or American pilots, ‘Go away, or they’ll shoot you down.’
The woman had asked in all the surrounding buildings whether there was a room for rent anywhere. I hadn’t come home yet when she rang our doorbell, and Frau Blase had been sitting in the kitchen. Feeling that she was asking an enormous amount, she had said she wanted five marks a day for the room. The woman, with peasant cunning, realised that she was talking to someone with no idea of present-day values. ‘Rather expensive,’ she said, ‘but I can pay five marks.’ Anywhere else many times that sum would have been demanded.
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