The catchers would walk through the city each day without their stars, on the lookout for underground Jews. If their prey was an old acquaintance, they would feign joy at seeing him or her and confide that they too were “illegals.” If the prey was simply someone they suspected of being Jewish, they would confide their “secret” in the hope of eliciting a similar confession. Once they had their information, they would make a discreet telephone call, and the Gestapo would soon show up.
The Gestapo had been employing catchers for some time now to find Jews who were not wearing their stars or were living with false papers, but the operation intensified after the February 27 Fabrik Aktion. Joseph Goebbels had vowed that he would not rest until Berlin was free of Jews; he had called on the police, the Wehrmacht and the party for assistance, but searching for Jews required extraordinary measures. Who could better ferret out these illegals than their own kind?
Months before he took his wife, Marlitt, and baby daughter, Lane, for an evening stroll into the underground, Fritz Croner, the resourceful young jeweler with the forbidding countenance and the iron determination to survive, had already had his first frightening, and bitter, experience with a fellow Jew.
The Croners’ steadiest contact for black market food at that time was Fedor Friedlander, a tall, extremely handsome young man of Russian descent who was exactly Fritz’s age. Fritz and Fedor had gotten to know one another while working on the same railroad gang. Fedor told Fritz that if he ever needed anything he, Fedor, had the contacts. At the time Fritz was buying on the black market to feed his own family, his parents and uncle. Several times a month Fedor would show up at the Croners’ apartment with the food, and the Croners would dig into a sack of rice in which they hid their money and jewels.
One evening, after returning from work, Fritz went to the rice sack to retrieve the jewels. They were gone—50,000 Reichsmarks’ worth. For a moment he was struck dumb. Without his resources, not only his own family but his parents and uncle could not survive. “Who?” he said at last to Marlitt.
“Only Fedor,” she answered.
From that moment on, all of Fritz’s thoughts were directed toward getting back his valuables. Going to the police was out of the question; not only would they refuse to help a Jew but since March 31, 1939, it had been illegal for Jews to own gold, silver and jewels. All such valuables were to have been relinquished to the city pawnbroker by that date.
In despair Fritz turned to his friend, the stateless Russian jeweler Makarow, with whom he frequently did business.
“Why don’t you try to get Friedlander to sell your things?” Makarow suggested.
“What do you mean?”
“Let it be known that you know someone who’s in the market for jewelry. The word will get back to Friedlander soon enough.”
Several days later Fritz encountered a man he knew to be friendly with Friedlander. He told the man, whose name was Gorka, that he knew of a foreigner who wanted to buy jewels.
“I know someone who’s got a lot of jewelry,” Gorka said.
“What’s his name?”
“Fedor Friedlander.”
“You get Friedlander to sell to the foreign buyer and I’ll give you a thousand marks,” Fritz offered. His one stipulation was that his own name be kept out of the transaction.
Within another few days a meeting had been arranged between Friedlander and the “foreign buyer”—Makarow. It was to take place at the apartment of Frau Kosimer. To protect her they gave her an alias, and just before the meeting placed a card with her false name on the door of the flat. Fritz hid in a bedroom next to the living room.
Friedlander arrived. He and Makarow took seats at a table. Friedlander put two pieces of jewelry on the table.
Makarow recognized them at once as Fritz’s. “I’m not interested in small stuff,” he scoffed. “I want big stones.”
More and more jewelry emerged from Friedlander’s pockets, until the table was virtually covered. Makarow nodded agreeably. “Now you’re talking,” he said. “Do you mind if I have a look at the pieces over by the window?”
“Of course not,” Friedlander replied.
Makarow wrapped the jewels in a cloth and carried them over to the window. Then he shouted, “Herr Croner! You can come out now.”
Fritz emerged. Seeing him, Friedlander turned white.
Fritz took an inventory. Two-thirds of the missing jewels were there.
“What’s still missing we will write down,” Makarow said to Friedlander. “These pieces are not Herr Croner’s, they are mine. Do you understand me?” The meaning was clear enough. Where Fritz was without legal recourse, Makarow could report Friedlander to the police.
Trembling, Friedlander swore that he would return with the rest of the jewels. Then he left. But he didn’t return, and Makarow did not want to risk further pursuit.
Fritz now had the bulk of his valuables back and could continue with his trading and thereby sustain his family. But he could not shake the episode. A Jew stealing from a Jew, he reminded himself over and over again. Bad enough that they were struggling to survive in a nation that had lost its mind; what chance did any of them have if they fought among themselves?
The episode had occurred in the spring of 1942, and by December, with the cold as penetrating as it can be only in the damp and overcast regions of northern Europe, Friedlander and people like him were no longer in the forefront of Fritz Croner’s mind. He was learning what so many Jews had learned or would learn in their first weeks in the underground—that the greatest adversary he faced in his fight to stay alive was not the Nazis or the average Germans or even other Jews. It was himself. His key to survival lay in his determination to go on. Now, as difficulty piled upon difficulty, he could sense the shriveling of his resolve.
He was staggered by the amount of money he would need to remain alive as an illegal. Whereas before, he, Marlitt and Lane had partly existed on food purchased legally, now all of their provisions would have to come from the black market. On that market, an egg cost 20 marks—about $1.50—a liter of good milk 60 marks, a pound of butter 500 marks.
Then there was the rent. Fritz spent his days scouring the city for some out-of-the-way apartment they could move into after January 1, when they would have to give up their barren sanctuary. The prices were appalling—hundreds of marks just for a room.
But it wasn’t only the cost of his illegal life that was ultimately getting to Fritz. What bothered him most was what his parents and other relatives had warned him of—the monumental uncertainty. Each day he and Marlitt lived in fear of discovery. Each day required a new explanation or improvisation. Assuming he could find a place to rent, what would he say to the landlord? How would he explain that he had no police registration, required of all residents of Berlin? Neither he nor Marlitt had any identification papers at all.
There were the constant looks from strangers. What was a healthy man of thirty-odd years doing out of uniform? So Fritz bought a cane and imitated the limp of his father, the wounded World War I veteran. But would that subterfuge fool the Gestapo?
And then there was Lane, now sixteen months old. She was a quiet child. They told one another that she felt she had to be quiet, that she had a sense of what was going on. But one day, inevitably, she would cry in some sanctuary where the existence of a child would be questioned, and then her sobbing could give them away.
The final weight on their minds was the knowledge that they were, in fact, being hunted. That had been confirmed on Christmas Eve, when they returned to their old apartment to find the door sealed, which meant that the Gestapo had come to pick them up. Fritz broke the seal and they went inside. The apartment hadn’t been touched. They packed shirts, underwear, linens and other household goods and carried them down to the street, where a non-Jewish friend named Bahn awaited them with a three-wheeled motorized bike. Then they moved slowly down the street, to the accompaniment of carols being sung in apartments on both sides.
Each evening, just
before the eight o’clock curfew, Fritz would meet his mother on a side street many blocks from her apartment, and she would give him cooked potatoes. He and Marlitt needed cooked potatoes because their own hotplate was so defective it would split if used for more than the few minutes it would take her to fry their Bratkartoffeln. But Fritz would be so nervous that he often couldn’t eat. Without a flat of their own, without adequate food, without enough money to support them through their illegality, he could only wonder how they would survive. What was there about him, he wondered, that made him think he could succeed where others had failed?
During Fritz’s first years in Berlin, in the mid-1930s, he had become friendly with the best known diamond merchant in the city. Laser Oppenheimer was unlike anyone Fritz had ever known before. He was a good-looking man, tall and dark, with fine features and an impressive mustache. He did not look Jewish. He spoke perfect French and had the manner of a Frenchman. When they met, Oppenheimer was fifty-five and alone. He and his wife were divorced, and he had no family in Berlin that Fritz knew about.
Oppenheimer liked Fritz at once. He recognized in Fritz a quality he would have liked to have had in children of his own. “You won’t inherit wealth from me because I no longer have any, but you will inherit my knowledge,” he told Fritz one day. He was as good as his word. He taught Fritz how to approximate the value of a stone on sight—to establish what kind of stone it was and evaluate its purity and weight. For these evaluations, Oppenheimer told his rapt pupil, one must depend on his sensibilities, the same sensibilities one uses to appraise a painting. It is experience that develops one’s esthetic sense, in the same way that repeated tastings develop one’s knowledge of fine wines.
In the years before Jews were barred from such places Laser Oppenheimer took Fritz Croner to museums and galleries on every occasion he could. He helped Fritz to distinguish great paintings from those that were merely good. He helped him develop an appreciation for antiques, fine China, and, of course, diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies and other precious stones. Patiently he explained why the dimensions of this cut were more pleasing esthetically than that one, when to assign a flawless rating to a diamond for its color. Slowly he built in Fritz the most important strength a dealer in precious stones can possess—a belief in his own judgment. One day Fritz purchased a brooch with an eight-karat emerald that other dealers had said was glass. To the jubilation of both teacher and pupil, the stone turned out to be genuine.
As their father-and-son friendship deepened, the two men began more and more to buy and sell jewels together. Then calamity struck Oppenheimer. He had given his valuables for safekeeping to Russian acquaintances. The men were Jews but had not been molested because they were Russian citizens. On the day in June 1941 that Germany invaded Russia, these men were arrested and Oppenheimer’s possessions were seized. Part of the seized jewels had been Fritz’s. When Oppenheimer came to tell him of the calamity, Fritz responded by giving Oppenheimer enough money to get back into business.
Each day after work, from then on, Oppenheimer would bring whatever he had bought during the day to Fritz to keep for him overnight. As the seasons passed and more and more Jews were picked up for deportation, Oppenheimer became more and more resolute. “They’ll never get me,” he told Fritz. Fritz thought Oppenheimer meant that he would go illegal.
Then, one day in July 1942, Oppenheimer did not show up for their meeting. The next day Fritz went to his apartment and rang the bell, but no one answered. Nor did Oppenheimer respond when Fritz returned the following day. That afternoon Fritz went to the Jewish community headquarters to inquire whether anyone knew of Oppenheimer’s whereabouts. He learned that Oppenheimer had been found the day before on the Wannsee in a rowboat that contained a cognac bottle and a sleeping pill vial, both empty.
Now, scant weeks after going underground, Fritz Croner knew he was feeling the same depths of despair that had led Laser Oppenheimer to take his own life. It was a feeling unlike any Fritz had ever felt before; nothing before, no matter how terrible, had caused him to think about giving up. But one evening he and Marlitt discussed that very possibility. They would find a woman who would raise Lane in exchange for all their remaining money, and then they would turn themselves in to the Gestapo.
8
COUNTESS MARIA VON MALTZAN had a Swedish friend, Eric Svensson, who had lived in Berlin for years. One day in July of 1942, five months after Hans Hirschel, the avant-garde intellectual, had moved into her flat on the Detmolder Strasse and three months after his mother, Luzie Hirschel, had been deported to Theresienstadt, the countess went to see Svensson. “Eric, I’ve got something awful to ask of you,” she began.
“Go ahead and ask.”
“I’m having a baby …”
Eric’s eyes went to her stomach, which appeared to him to be all but flat. “Where have you got it?” he asked.
“Never mind. I’ve got it.” She drew a breath. “You know who the father is,” she said. It was not a question.
“It’s quite clear, yes.”
“I can’t go to the Registry and say Hans is the father. Will you be the father?”
Eric frowned. A nervous laugh escaped him. “For heaven’s sake, I’ve got a wife in Sweden.”
“Whom you haven’t seen in twenty years,” Marushka countered at once. She had thought it all out. “Look, what could happen better to you? It would be marvelous for your reputation.”
Eric smiled in spite of himself. For years he had tried hard to play down his homosexuality. He was concerned about his reputation and worried about the effect on his daughter if the truth got out. For these reasons he had remained married. Now Marushka’s request began to make a certain ribald sense. “It’s true my wife wouldn’t find out,” he said aloud.
Suddenly they were laughing together.
The charade began at once. Early each evening Eric would come to Marushka’s apartment and take her for a walk. They would deliberately choose crowded streets and give a firm greeting to anyone they knew. Marushka saved her shopping for that time of day. “This is my boyfriend,” she would tell the shopkeepers. On at least one occasion in every shop she would become disagreeable with the owners. Eric would calm her down. It had all been rehearsed. She wanted to be certain that the shopkeepers remembered Eric. Later, sitting in her apartment, she would roll cigarettes for Eric, who was a heavy smoker. “Imagine what people think we’re doing,” she said, laughing. Eric and Hans laughed with her.
On September 6 Marushka felt the first contractions. A friend took her to a hospital run by the nuns of the Order of St. Vincent. “To which department have you been ordered?” the tired, cold-faced nun at the reception desk asked her.
“I’m having a baby,” Marushka replied, and watched the same incredulous look she had seen so many times before.
The slim hips that had served her so well in sports and won so many admiring glances now caused her hours of labor. The pain was agonizing, but Marushka refused to cry out. Finally she told the midwife who was attending her that she was from the S.S. and asked to be drugged. As a doctor administered an injection the midwife squeezed Marushka’s arm. “Women who have babies in this way don’t get fat behinds when they get older,” she said. To Marushka it seemed like poor consolation.
The delivery on September 7, 1942, was just as tough. A doctor put her under with ether and extracted the baby with forceps. It was a boy, frightfully small, but in the moments before he was placed in an incubator, Marushka noted that he had high ears like his father.
That night the air raids were especially heavy. Marushka was sick to her stomach. She would slip into sleep as though she was being carried off in the ebb of a wave, then crash into wakefulness with the next burst of a bomb or fit of nausea.
In the morning an old nun with a kindly face came to her bed and took her hand but said nothing.
“Why aren’t you speaking of the child? What’s the matter?” Marushka said.
“He’s dead,” the old nun said. A bom
b had destroyed the generators that supplied electricity to the quarter. The incubators had shut down. All of the incubator babies had died.
For a moment Marushka closed her eyes. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t. Then she looked at the nun. “I’d like to ask you a favor. If you can’t do it, just say so. Would it be possible for the child’s real father to see him?”
“I’ll have it arranged.”
At two in the morning on September 9 Hans walked softly into a small chapel on the ground floor of the hospital. He sat for half an hour at the side of the coffin as shadows from the candles played across his son’s face, imparting, eerily, the quality of life. Somewhere the nuns had found masses of flowers, and their scent filled the room. Toward three o’clock the night guard took him to Marushka’s room. “I’ve got a visitor here,” he whispered. “Just ring the bell when he wants to leave.”
Hans took Marushka’s.hand and held it without speaking. His face was dark with grief. Finally he said to Marushka, “The only thing I’m grateful for is that mother doesn’t know—and won’t.” He could scarcely speak the last words.
Marushka held him. “Better times will come,” she promised. “Better times will come.”
9
SAVED BY an S.S. officer’s wife! Over and over again Ruth Thomas pondered that unimaginable irony in those first tentative days after her fate had passed into the hands of Hilde Hohn. Hilde, trim and young and pretty like Ruth herself, had taken her in on a whim and against her better judgment because she recognized in Ruth, and responded to, some aspect of herself. Was it that each of them was determined to fix a happy face on life despite the wretched time in which they lived? For the moment Ruth couldn’t know, because the relationship was too fragile to be tested, and the consequences of a strain in that relationship—be it from a poorly received question or a premature attempt to be familiar—were too horrible to even contemplate. More than that: Ruth’s energies were preempted by concern for her mother and Kurt. Especially Kurt. She had waited too long for marriage, and it was still too new for her not to miss his presence.
The Last Jews in Berlin Page 7