Kurt had come to her at the end of a series of events that would have broken any woman without her extraordinary mechanism for dealing with adversity. Everything that had happened to Ruth had to be measured against the riches with which she had begun life. It was not so much a matter of money—her mother was comfortably off, but not wealthy—as it was the circumstances in which she grew up and the talent she brought to life. She was a child of the twenties, a time when open, malicious anti-Semitism pervaded German society. And yet such swirls of malice scarcely touched her. Ruth grew up in the midst of a culturally abundant environment that was as German as it was Jewish, embodying a devotion to high values—a life of concerts and plays and operas and lectures that generated a constant barrage of ideas in a vibrant and free-thinking city. To be part of that society—as the most successful Jews considered themselves—was to experience a life as good as life could be. For these Jews it was an affluent life as well, in splendid neighborhoods of stately homes on large wooded lots, some of the homes nestled next to shimmering lakes, with a cozy inn here and there where one took a gigantic Sunday meal. There were poor Jews in Berlin in the late twenties—one in four was receiving charity—but Jews were well represented in remunerative areas of business, and if they had not yet made it to the most desirable neighborhoods near the Grunewald, Berlin’s giant park on the southwest side of the city, there were those Jews who had made it to inspire them.
Ruth was reared in a large family of uncles, aunts and cousins. Going to the synagogue was a family affair. She loved it. She thought of herself as a Jewish girl for whom religion was not just a matter of faith but an expression of character.
Ruth’s mother, Anna Rosenthal, made certain Ruth received the best education private schools could provide. Ruth had the mind for it. She was interested in music, archaeology and architecture, and would have happily studied in any of those fields, but by the time she was ready, higher study had been proscribed for Jews. It was 1933; Ruth was nineteen. The only way she could have continued her education was to go abroad, but she didn’t want to leave her mother. Besides, her mother needed her help.
Anna Rosenthal owned a designer dress shop in the best shopping district of Berlin, a few blocks from the Unter den Linden. Her manager took Ruth under her wing and taught her the business. Ruth had a flair for adapting the designs of European couturiers, and the store was soon selling her creations. If she was underemployed—if she had regrets about her lost opportunities in a more suitable field—she never revealed it. Rather, what she showed to others was her keenness, her warmth and her zest for life. She loved a good story, she loved the deep well of culture that was her heritage on both the Jewish and German sides. She was aroused by her surroundings and experiences. And she was ambitious to grow as far as possible, to be involved artistically and culturally.
And then it all began to change.
The first change involved Ruth’s relationship with Aunt Martha, who was not really a blood relative but a close Gentile friend—dear Aunt Martha, who loved to eat and drink and kept getting bigger and bigger until a tape measure would scarcely reach around her. She lived with her husband and three children in Mecklenburg, a two-hour drive from Berlin. They ran an inn, which was the social center of a rich agricultural province. There the locals ate and drank beer. The restaurant had private dining rooms and a garden that overflowed with blooms and fragrance in the summer. In addition to her thriving restaurant Aunt Martha owned a great deal of land. She was a very wealthy woman and a generous one. Whenever a get-together was arranged, she would have her cook prepare abundant quantities of the most delicious food, almost all of it richer by far than anything her guests were used to in Berlin.
Ruth’s mother liked nothing more than long weekends in the country, so the family would travel to Mecklenburg every holiday and almost every weekend. They would leave after lunch on Saturday and arrive in time for afternoon cakes and coffee. Ruth loved to go as much as Mother. Aunt Martha’s three children—Heinz, Käthe and Ilza—were older than she was, but they treated her like a beloved younger sister. Heinz, in particular, always had presents for her and told her wonderful stories. And there was a castle to play in nearby that had belonged to Aunt Martha’s grandmother.
One Saturday when they arrived they noticed a new picture on the living room wall. It was a picture of a man with a small trim mustache who wore a brown shirt and a Sam Brown belt. “Who’s that?” Mother asked.
“That’s our Hitler,” Aunt Martha said.
“And who is Hitler?”
“He’s going to make Germany great.”
As the years passed and Hitler’s power grew, the anti-Semitic utterances that might once have been dismissed as a lunatic’s ravings had to be regarded more and more seriously. Yet Aunt Martha scoffed at the idea that Hitler meant to harm the Jews. “Just politics,” she said.
And then came Saturday, April 1, 1933, and the boycott of all Jewish enterprises in Germany. Hitler had been sworn in as Chancellor two months earlier by Paul von Hindenburg, President of the German Republic, on the supposition that only he and his National Socialists—by then the largest party in the country, with one-third the popular vote—could deal with the paralysis that had immobilized the government for months. Hitler took power legally; there followed immediately a series of illegal acts designed to consolidate his power and intimidate the opposition. A fire set in the Reichstag, blamed on a Dutch pyromaniac, who may have been used by the National Socialists, gave Hitler his excuse to begin a pseudolegal process of abolishing all constitutional guarantees of individual freedom. The party’s infamous storm troopers assaulted the political opposition, trade union leaders and Jews. Sheer terror purged the Reichstag of so many opposition deputies that Hitler had no trouble in pushing through the Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers. The boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, which simply institutionalized storm trooper violence against Jewish professionals and businesses, was Hitler’s first formal effort against the people he believed to be at the heart of a Bolshevik conspiracy to destroy Germany.
That day the bell rang in the new, more comfortable apartment Ruth and Anna had recently moved into in the Bavarian Quarter, a neighborhood comprised mostly of Jewish families. Ruth opened the door. There stood Aunt Martha. At her side was her chauffeur, carrying a huge basket of food. Aunt Martha was confused and distraught. She and her husband had been party members since the early twenties. Their circumstances had improved even more since Hitler had come to power. But it’s not easy to disavow old friendships, she told them, and she had no intention of doing so. “Hitler must not harm you,” she said.
She confessed that she hadn’t expected anything like the boycott. She had feared that they were starving. She feared the future. “You are such beautiful people,” she kept saying over and over again. And then she made an astonishing proposal. Anna and Ruth should come and live with her. She was sure she could protect them.
Anna turned the offer down. When they parted she said, “We probably won’t see each other again. Our roads will separate now.”
“No,” Aunt Martha protested.
“You’ll see,” Mother said.
But then Ruth and Anna received letters from all three of Aunt Martha’s children. They were all grown now, they were all in good positions because of their political involvement, but all of them wrote that they could not imagine a holiday without Ruth and Anna, and they begged them to come. Käthe, one of Aunt Martha’s daughters, had married an important Nazi, a gauleiter, the leader of a political district. Now Käthe wrote them that nothing would happen to them. “Our ambitions are only against academic people, officials, civil servants, not the people in production.”
The letter reassured Anna somewhat. Then, too, they still had numbers of Christian friends, most of whom went out of their way to express their disapproval of Hitler’s attacks against the Jews. And although Ruth and Anna were acutely conscious that physical aggression against Jews was increasing, no
t once were they themselves harmed.
One of the assets that helped the family through this time was Ruth’s ability to perceive the comic aspects of life, however dour it became. The so-called Nuremberg Laws, passed by the Nazis at a party rally on September 15, 1935, held in the central Bavarian city that was known as the spiritual home of National Socialism, were a good example. These laws “for the protection of German blood and German honor” forbade marriages between Jews and “citizens of German or kindred blood” as well as “extramarital intercourse between Jews and citizens of German or kindred blood.” Hard labor, fines and imprisonment awaited violators, Jews or non-Jews alike. Ruth found the laws so ludicrous she refused to take them seriously. And how could people who passed such inane decrees be taken seriously? she argued. The Nazis were so ridiculous, how could there be any danger? She couldn’t see how Hitler could remain in power very long. It was just the kind of talk Mother needed to stiffen her own sagging spirits.
But it wasn’t long before Ruth and her mother both had to acknowledge the threat and the danger inherent in the Nuremberg Laws, because they indirectly caused a break with Aunt Martha.
It happened unexpectedly. A young Gentile woman Anna knew was married to a Jew. The couple owned a small, well-kept hotel in Berlin. One day the woman came to ask Anna’s advice. The party had demanded that she dissolve her marriage; if she didn’t, she was told, she’d be forced to give up her hotel. What should she do? Anna decided to consult Aunt Martha. Several days later they met in the Bavarian Quarter apartment. Aunt Martha listened to the story. Then she said, “Divorce your husband and send him abroad.” She made it clear that the issue was not so much one of keeping a property as it was safeguarding a human life. If he was out of the country, no harm could come to him.
Aunt Martha’s answer stunned Anna. It might be sensible, but it wasn’t ethical. Then and there she decided that the differences between them were now too great for the relationship to continue. A few days later she wrote Aunt Martha: “A woman belongs to her husband. She should stay at his side.” She could not accept the manner in which Aunt Martha had viewed the problem.
Ruth and Anna would never return to Mecklenburg.
In 1937 Ruth met a Spanish Jew in his early thirties named Bernd Hertz. He fell in love with her and urged her to emigrate with him to the United States. Ruth cared for Bernd and thought that she might even love him, but she could not even consider the prospect of leaving her mother alone in Berlin, where life for a Jew had become too dangerous. Ruth told him that she and her mother would join him in America as soon as they could.
By now they were more than ready to emigrate; two relatives had already been sent to concentration camps. They applied for visas to the United States, and deposited money in banks in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia while on their holidays. Their sponsor in the United States was a young cousin who was teaching school. In the spring of 1938 they received their affidavits of support. Their papers were now in order; as soon as their number came up, their visa would be issued.
But the quota of Germans allowed entrance into the United States each year was 27,000, and several times this number of Germans, most of them Jews, had applied for visas before them.
And then came Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass, November 9–10, 1938.
In Paris, two days earlier, a young German Jewish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan had entered the German Embassy intending to assassinate the ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck. Grynszpan’s parents, Polish Jews who had lived in Hannover nearly twenty-five years, had recently been expelled from Germany along with some 50,000 Jews who had originally come from Poland. Anguished by this event as well as by the persecutions against the Jews in general, Grynszpan had shot and mortally wounded Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary of the embassy, who had come out to determine his business. Ironically, Vom Rath’s own sentiments had been sufficiently anti-Nazi to prompt his surveillance by the Gestapo. When Vom Rath died of his wounds two days later, it was an excuse for the National Socialists to go on a rampage. No spontaneous riot, it was carefully orchestrated, with Hitler’s blessings, by Joseph Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, who, as Heinrich Himmler’s second in command in the S.S., ran the Gestapo and the Security Service.
The rampage laid waste to at least 7,500 shops throughout Germany. Preliminary figures from Heydrich in a confidential report to Hermann Goering on November 11 indicated that 119 synagogues had been set on fire and another 76 completely destroyed. The human toll was far worse. The number of Jews murdered that night was never accurately established, but one hundred would be conservative. Hundreds of Jews were injured and many women were raped—to the consternation of party purists, who abhorred any mingling of Jew and Gentile. Twenty thousand Jews were arrested, many of them, not coincidentally, well-to-do; it had been the intention from the outset to incarcerate Jews who could be ransomed later for a high price.
As the marauders set the torch to Jewish property throughout Germany and crashed their clubs against store-front windows, the Jews themselves, lacking specific information, could only surmise that some form of retribution was being exacted for the death of Vom Rath. Anna had already sold her shop for a pittance to a member of the Nazi party, so it was spared when the buyer intervened. But later that night the marauders reached the Bavarian Quarter. When the doorbell to their apartment rang, Ruth instinctively responded. But before she had reached the door she felt herself seized from behind and pushed roughly away. A hand went over her mouth, muffling her startled cry. It was Frieda, their housekeeper, a young woman just a few years older than Ruth—Frieda, her friend, who had worked for them for ten years, Frieda who, on her days and evenings off, had enough contact with young pro-Nazis to know how readily they could be incited to acts against the Jews. Frieda motioned to Ruth to be quiet. The two women lay on the floor until whoever was at the door went away and there was no more sound of crashing glass.
The next year brought another calamity. Ruth had grown up with a cousin named Werner, the son of Aunt Paula, her mother’s sister. Werner was five years older than Ruth and, like her, an only child. He lived close by. Ruth and Werner spent so much time together that they felt like brother and sister. They were kindred spirits too. Werner refused to be demolished by the Nazis’ constraints. He adjusted his life to reality. He was a pianist. In other times he might have become a concert pianist; now he contented himself with playing cocktail music in bars. He was gifted and, until circumstances became too difficult, in great demand. After the Nazis came to power he frequently accepted bookings in foreign countries, where he would be free to play the American jazz the Nazis so abominated because of its Negro idioms. He especially liked to work on the Riviera, where single women were abundant. Werner was a lady’s man who had left the proverbial trail of broken hearts. It was this propensity that eventually undid him. One day, en route with his mother to a relative’s birthday party in Berlin, Werner chanced upon an old girl friend, a Gentile woman, who had not taken their parting lightly. To their horror the young woman walked up to a policeman and denounced Werner—who was having an affair with another Christian woman—for violation of the Nuremberg Laws. He was arrested, tried and sentenced to several years in prison.
Not even Ruth could come to terms with the reality of Werner’s fate. For weeks she anguished over the prospect that Werner might be beaten to death by prison guards, as the Gestapo had beaten another cousin.
And then, just as she felt herself slipping for the first time in her life into an abyss of depression, Ruth met Kurt Thomas, and promptly fell in love.
Thomas, a radiologist, was in his late fifties, more than thirty years Ruth’s senior, yet young in his appearance and ways. They had been introduced by his stepdaughter, who was a customer of Ruth’s. Kurt’s age was simply not a problem for Ruth. In fact, had she been an “Aryan,” her affair would have been very much à la mode; given the absence of young men called up to military service, liaisons with older men were so common by no
w among German women that the subject had already been treated in contemporary literature.
Kurt agreed at once to emigrate and made his own visa application. But the realities were against them, for the waiting list for visas to the United States contained the names of about 200,000 persons, almost all of them Jews. In 1939, for the first time, the American consulate would issue the full quota of visas, 27,370. But only 5,524 German-born persons would actually enter the United States—one-fifth as many as had qualified to go—because of obstructions imposed by the Nazis. It would be even worse in 1940, when only 3,556 German-born persons would be admitted to the United States, despite the fact that 27,355 visas had been issued.
As they waited, Ruth, Anna and Kurt depended on Ruth’s dress-designing skills, which they recognized as their ticket to salvation. Their everyday experiences reinforced their feelings that, in spite of the worsening conditions, they themselves were safe.
The most distressing event of 1941 for Ruth did not directly affect her. A few months after the United States entered the war, her cousin Werner, still in jail for having violated the Nuremberg Laws, learned that he would be among the first Jews to be “resettled in the East,” as the Nazis put it. Despite the uncertainty, Werner found the prospect appealing. It would get him out of jail, for one thing. And it would at last distance him from the madness that Berlin had come to represent. How hard could the life in Poland be, compared to his present reality? A final consideration was the prospect of heavy bombings by the Allies; that day might be a long way off, but Werner was certain it was inevitable. In leaving Berlin for Poland, he would at least be eliminating the bombings as a possible cause of death. Werner wrote to his mother suggesting that she volunteer to come along, so that they could be resettled together. Aunt Paula took Werner’s advice. Other family members could do nothing to dissuade her. The Gestapo gladly obliged.
The Last Jews in Berlin Page 8