The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  Hans was not good at household tasks, nor did he enjoy them. It was not that he was unwilling or felt demeaned; it was just that he was inefficient, and nothing in his previous life had prepared him for such circumstances. All his life he had been attended to by either his mother or their housekeeper. Luzie Hirschel had encouraged her son’s dependence as a means of keeping him for as long as she could. Ironically, certain women who were drawn to him initially because of his good looks became even more entranced when they discovered his dependency.

  To a degree, Marushka was one of them. She enjoyed giving Hans his haircuts, or doing his wash—one household task Hans was never able to manage—but she was careful not to smother him. She esteemed what she called his “exquisite” brains, his philosophical bent, his cleverness, his wit. But she knew that Hans perceived himself in another light. Like many intellectuals, he wanted to be admired for his physical prowess almost more than his mind, and he would often boast about his accomplishments in such sports as tennis and boxing. The truth was that he was an all but hopeless athlete, and his boasts—considered in relation to his slim, almost frail physique—seemed like fantasies, which invariably sent Marushka into fits of laughter. One evening, recounting his experiences on the railroad gang before he went into hiding, he bragged of having lifted up a section of track that weighed 750 pounds. Marushka laughed so hard that he finally had to join her.

  In the main, however, Hans was as well suited for a period of enforced seclusion as any man could be, and at the outset—before his mother’s deportation and the baby’s death—he had rather relished the privacy. Even now he admitted that the imprisonment had its uses. One of his greatest problems had always been to maintain his focus on the subject at hand. Coupled with the philosopher’s love of abstractions, it had tended to make his writings diffuse and difficult to understand. Now, as his reality became more concrete and circumscribed, his work sharpened.

  He had his one great intellectual passion to occupy him—his fascination with the dark side of even the most positive religious movement. But he also had a great deal of specific work—more, ironically, than he had ever had in normal times—articles, book reviews, radio plays, even short books. It was Marushka who would obtain the assignments, ostensibly for herself. She would then give them to Hans to do, along with the research materials he would need. When he finished a draft Marushka would rewrite it, not out of vanity but from caution. Their styles were poles apart. It would not have done for anyone to question the authorship.

  Hans did an article on Jan Hus, a radio play about a Finnish general, a play on Cromwell, one on the Boer War. The Cromwell play was intended to show how nasty the British had been to the Irish, the Boer War play how savagely they had treated the Boers, even putting them in concentration camps. Everything that Hans wrote, however, contained a guarded put-down of the Nazis, which only the Nazis failed to recognize.

  In the evenings Hans and Marushka would listen to radio plays written by party hacks and laugh at the bad style and awful structure. Together they wrote a play about Louis Napoleon, trying, for once, to do it on a high level. The play was rejected.

  “Let’s write the worst possible play we can,” Hans proposed. When they finished he said, “It’s so vile, they’ll never take it.” The script was accepted without revision.

  Hans’s working day began after a lunch of oatmeal or other cereal, which he would dutifully prepare and then often forgo. When he had finished with the writing assignments he would either read or work on a poem. When a poem was finished he would place it on Marushka’s pillow. It was in these poems that his true feelings came out—his gratitude to Marushka, his sense of lost potential, his feeling of alienation from the normal pulse of life.

  “Our love fills the black void between us,” he wrote in one of his poems. He was putting into as positive a context as he could the troubling knowledge that they had come from different worlds—Marushka from one dominated by an aristocratic mother who collected anti-Semitic literature, Hans from another, dominated by a worldly mother who moved in the highest literary circles. To an extent Hans’s Jewishness—like his mother’s and even his father’s—had been largely replaced by his Germanness. He “felt” Jewish and was recognized as a Jew by others—the two fundamental criteria of whether one is or isn’t a Jew—but he had no deep religious feeling. Because Marushka was such a free spirit, he had planned to defer to her in their child’s religious training.

  Since the 1870s, when Napoleonic concepts of equal rights gained acceptance in Germany, many Jews had shown their gratitude at being legitimized by becoming more German than the Germans. They supported the fatherland, both emotionally and practically. Yet even after Otto von Bismarck guaranteed civil rights to Jews in 1871, theory and reality were far apart. It took military service in World War I to make these rights, and full equality for Jews, an actuality. Almost 100,000 Jews had served in the army; 80,000 saw combat; 35,000 were decorated for bravery; 12,000 were killed. Hans himself had been decorated for his service in the final years of the great war, and he had supported Germany’s aspirations wholeheartedly. He could not believe, let alone accept, what had happened since. In one poem, “The Song of a German Jew,” he tried to express what it meant to feel so German and then suddenly not be permitted to be German.

  The reality of Hans’s confinement grew more vivid with each day. The longer it went on, the more troubled he became. Discourse had been his life, and now he was all but deprived of it. Occasionally Marushka would bring home some fellow students, and Hans, posing as “Professor Schoeler,” would drill them in preparation for exams. The only friends Marushka could bring to him were those whose company tended to be unexciting; those friends engaged in touchy political work told Marushka it was better for everyone if they stayed away.

  So, sadly, Hans’s closest companions became the dogs—two Scotch terriers Marushka had bought to keep him company and also to breed for the income she could get from the puppies. Every morning Hans would groom the dogs and then play with them. When he did the household chores, he would talk to them. “Have you any idea where the towels might be?” he would ask. The dogs would stare at him and wag their tails. A little after ten Irmelin Patrick, the fiancée of one of Marushka’s nephews, would come to take the dogs for their morning walk; Hans would peek through the curtain and watch them play. At eleven o’clock they would return for their meal. “I’ve got a lovely meal for you today,” he would tell them. “You’ll start off with a fine soup—bouillon with egg and cream. Then you’re having venison with a cream sauce and red currant jelly. For dessert a splendid sorbet.” Then he would serve them their dog food.

  Despite his circumstances Hans rarely showed moodiness or despair. He refused to be destroyed, either by his own imprisonment or the threats of capture. His greatest problem was in coming to terms with the baby’s death. He thought its moment of life had been senseless. “No!” Marushka argued one evening. “Every human being has some destiny to fulfill. This child, in one day, had a reason for his existence. If it wasn’t for him you would have been killed in Poland.” Hans looked away and closed his eyes. He was silent for several minutes. When he looked back at Marushka his eyes were shining. “I’ll try to believe that,” he said.

  Only once did he raise his voice. “This damned war! This damned Hitler!” he shouted one day after his mother was deported. “You have to go out and do all this filthy work while I sit here helpless.” But at all other times he remained amazingly equable, considering what he was going through. If he did feel himself slipping into despondency, he would play with the dogs or talk to the birds. Marushka had cages of them—finches, canaries, parrakeets. When Marushka arrived home in the evening his first order of business would be to tell her how the dogs had played that day and how the birds had sung.

  With Marushka’s return Hans would feel that he had been released from prison. If she looked particularly tired he would tell her to lie down and then bring her supper on a fastidiously arrange
d plate. He would try to convince her that his own day, spent in solitary confinement, had passed easily and happily. Only when he saw Marushka relaxing would he begin to bombard her with questions about her day. He had to know everything. He would open up her handbag, pull out its contents and demand to know where she had obtained each item. Usually there was a story attached to every object, because Marushka was such a proficient dealer on Berlin’s black market. That market had commenced, as elsewhere in Germany, at the outset of the war. Within a few years it thrived to a degree the Nazis were reluctant to acknowledge. While food was the major trading item, false documents ran a close second, particularly as the war dragged on. Such documents—ration cards, priority cards, tickets, identifications—were Marushka’s stock-in-trade. A false document could bring in hundreds of marks, which she would then exchange for food.

  Marushka treasured her independence. She believed she could support herself and Hans by her black market transactions as well as her jobs. At the time Hans moved in with her, she estimated it would cost 1,000 marks a month to feed him, because all of his food came from the black market. Later the figure went much higher. But she always found a way—even performing an occasional abortion, for which she charged 3,000 marks.

  One day a veterinarian Marushka knew was called upon to inspect a herd of cattle that had been shipped in from the Ukraine in an obviously unhealthy state. The veterinarian diagnosed a rare liver disease. Unfortunately for him that disease existed only in tropical climates. The man was fired, and Marushka got his job. Each Sunday when she went to the countryside to inspect the livestock, the peasants would load her up with fresh vegetables. What she didn’t need she would trade for other foods.

  To fill their stomachs she was not above a little mischief. One day she picked up her telephone and, because of crossed wires, overheard a conversation between a woman she knew, a Mrs. Zifkowitz, and a man who sold poultry on the black market. Mrs. Zifkowitz was in the process of ordering an extremely large goose. As soon as the conversation ended, Marushka telephoned Mrs. Zifkowitz. Using a deep voice, she identified herself as a police officer and said that she had overheard the conversation and intended to report the episode. However, she said, she was the father of nine children; if Mrs. Zifkowitz agreed to leave the goose in a certain shed in a park near her home, she would not be reported. The next evening Marushka collected the goose.

  Stories like these meant more to Hans than the food itself. He doted on Marushka. She was the most marvelous person he had ever known, a free and independent spirit, with an exotic background that he never tired of hearing about even when he had heard the same story dozens of times before.

  She would tell him about her father, the count, the only member of her family she truly liked. He was descended from a line of Maltzans who had come into Germany from Sweden with Gustavus II, the “Lion of the North,” during the first part of the seventeenth century—Protestant knights come to war upon the Catholics. They were granted estates in Silesia and East Prussia. Maltzan went one better; he married the only daughter of the ruler of Silesia—there were no sons—and thus succeeded to his title.

  Marushka’s father, Andreas von Maltzan, inherited a German estate of 18,000 acres. Although he lived in the twentieth century, he was as much a lord of the manor as his forebears. Any of the inhabitants of the estate who wished to marry were married by the count. Von Maltzan was respected—not liked, but he had a liberal conscience. He created hospitals, orphanages and old-age homes.

  The Von Maltzan estate had passed rhythmically through the centuries between heirs with a head for business and those more interested in the arts. Marushka’s father was in the latter category—his passions were paintings and antiques—but if he knew little about farming, he had the good sense to employ competent people.

  When Andreas read to his daughter, he eschewed fairy tales in favor of more substantial works. By the time she enrolled in school she was reasonably well educated in history, and, not surprisingly, one of her first acts was to challenge her teacher’s knowledge. In the ensuing uproar the count came to the school to investigate, and that evening he advised Maria: “Be kind to him. He doesn’t know anything.”

  The count did his utmost to instill principles in Maria, but he was not a preacher. The lessons he taught her were usually given in a more practical form. One day Maria, then seven years old, rushed in to report that the cottage of her nursery maid had burned to the ground. “I know,” her father said. “Don’t worry, the insurance will pay for it.”

  “No, it won’t,” Maria said, and then repeated what she had heard her distraught guardian discussing with her husband. The family had been cutting hay the previous evening by the light of an open fire. Embers from the fire had started the blaze on the cottage roof. They knew that the fire had resulted from their own carelessness and that the insurance company wouldn’t pay.

  Count von Maltzan thought for a moment. “Maria,” he said then, “how much money do you have in the bank?”

  “Two hundred and seventeen marks.”

  “I suggest you go and get it. Berta has cleaned your shoes and taken care of you for a long time. Now you must take care of her.”

  That day Maria gave Berta two hundred marks.

  Although Maria had three sisters and a brother, she led a fairly lonely life, which accounted considerably for the fierce love she developed for animals, including birds and even reptiles. The estate abounded in snakes; when Maria found one she would seize it, stroke it until it relaxed, examine it, and then let it go. One day she found a pile of dead snakes, and learned that the gardeners had killed them at the behest of her brother, who loathed reptiles. That day Maria invited her brother for a ride in her new boat, which she had bought with the proceeds from the sale of white mice and guinea pigs she had raised. When they were far enough out in the lake she pushed him overboard, grabbed his legs and held him so that his head remained under water. She would have drowned him if her father had not intervened.

  To Maria, growing up was a war of survival. From her earliest years she believed that everyone ganged up on her, and with reason. When she was seven her sisters would contrive to send her to the stable on some pretext just before teatime. Their mother had an inviolable rule: anyone who did not have his or her feet under the table exactly at four o’clock got black bread at tea instead of buttered toast, jam and pastries. Each time Maria would be late, there would be more buttered toast and pastries for her sisters and brother to share. One day Maria finally figured it out. She went to the garden, grabbed a Kreuzotter, a poisonous three-foot snake, behind the head and marched with it into the dining room. “I want a good tea,” she announced. “I want my buttered toast and jam and pastries. Either I get it or I let the snake go.” She got her good tea.

  She also ran her own little world. She made all her own decisions and took care of herself, partly because no one else would help her, partly because she surmised—correctly, in most cases—that she was more capable than the others involved, and only her combativeness would enable her to survive. Her mother had made it plain to her when she was very young that she didn’t like her. “Every other child I delivered in less than three hours,” she once said. “You took twenty-seven.”

  The countess made no effort to disguise her biases. She favored some of her children more than others. Her favorite of favorites was her son, the youngest child; her feeling for him was reinforced by the loss of an older boy. She cared for her husband, but was dismayed by their provincial life. Her most active biases were those against the Jews. Over the years a series of neighboring estates had been subdivided, and many of the smaller estates had been bought by Jews. Inevitably, intermarriages resulted, and when one countess converted to Judaism on her marriage to a Jew, Countess von Maltzan was beside herself. “I don’t want you marrying a Jew,” she warned Maria.

  If Maria had any doubts about her mother’s lack of affection, they were banished in her thirteenth year, at the bedside of her dying father. “Y
our mother doesn’t like you,” he told her. “But try to be polite and do what you should do.”

  To Hans the notion of an uncaring mother was all but incredible. His own grief at the departure and certain death of his cherished mother was minimized by Marushka’s strength. He knew that in some respects he had traded one mother for another. He lived for Marushka’s presence, and rejoiced at each return, as if it were a reunion following a prolonged separation.

  Which made her abrupt, inexplicable departures in the night all the more painful.

  They had begun almost at once after Hans moved in. There was no pattern to them. She might remain at home for weeks without going out in the evening. Then there would be weeks when she’d leave the house several evenings in a row. Often these sudden departures would be preceded by a phone call. It was obvious to Hans by the way she answered the phone that something was going on. Even if she was sitting right next to the phone, she wouldn’t respond until it had rung three times. Sometimes the caller hung up after two rings. When that happened Marushka would look at her watch. About a minute later the phone would begin to ring again. Once more Marushka wouldn’t answer—and once more the phone would ring twice and then stop. A minute later the phone would begin to ring again. Only then would Marushka answer.

  Hans could never understand the conversation. It would be too fragmented, or oblique or guarded. Often she would leave at once after the call and be gone for several hours. On the few occasions when he had tried to find out what she was up to, she had brushed his queries aside.

  One evening in the summer of 1942 Marushka came in especially late. Hans was waiting up for her. She went immediately to the bathroom and put some antiseptic on a neck wound.