As he waited at a corner of the Olivaer Platz a young man came up to him and held out a Gestapo card. “Mr. Croner,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”
Fritz’s heart exploded. Slowly he turned to look at the man. He knew he had never seen him before. It took every bit of effort he had, but he managed to force a frown. “You’re mistaken,” he said. “My name is Kramer.”
“Turn around,” the young man said.
Fritz turned around. Standing against a building on the other side of the Olivaer Platz was Fedor Friedlander, the man who had stolen his jewels and been forced to give them back.
Caught! Fritz turned back to the young man, the only thought in his mind to shove him and run. But the young man showed him a gun. “If you’re thinking of doing anything, I wouldn’t advise it,” he said.
The young man took Fritz with him to a beauty shop on the Kurfürstendamm a few blocks from the Olivaer Platz. There he spoke to a young and beautiful blond woman who was having her hair done. “I’ve got one,” he said. “I’ll take him to Grolmanstrasse.”
The woman nodded. She would not look at Fritz.
The young man went to make a phone call. “I’ve got someone to be picked up,” Fritz heard him say. “I’m taking him to the police station. You can collect him there.”
Half an hour later the young man dropped Fritz off at the Grolmanstrasse police station. Then he left. Fritz spent the afternoon waiting. There was an elderly police officer at the station who passed by him several times. Perhaps it was his imagination, but Fritz thought the officer seemed upset for some reason. Finally Fritz took a chance. “Who was the man who brought me? Do you know?” he asked.
The policeman looked to his left and right. No one was within hearing distance. “That’s the tragedy of the situation,” he said then. “One Jew brings another Jew to the knife.”
22
FOR WEEKS NOW those mysterious evening telephone calls to Marushka had been coming with increasing frequency, until she was averaging almost one a night. And always it was the same. Two rings, then silence. A minute later another two rings, and then another minute’s silence. Then the telephone would ring a third time, and finally Marushka would answer, only to speak so softly and in such an elliptical manner that Hans had no idea what she was discussing.
One morning as she was leaving for work Marushka said to Hans, “I’ll be home quite late this evening. I’ve got something to do.”
Hans’s question died on his lips. He knew that asking would yield nothing. In vain he searched her face for clues.
Late that afternoon Marushka took the train from Berlin. Two young men went with her. They were in their twenties. She knew nothing about them, only that they had been assigned to accompany her. All the way out no one spoke a word. At Frohnau they got off the train and walked north, through the square, its lush lawns faded now and covered with dead leaves. The air was crisp but not cold. Good, Marushka thought. There was almost no movement on the streets. She had been worried about encountering patrols, but had been assured there would be none, and there were none this night. They walked a mile from the town, to the beginning of a forest. Then they turned off and walked into the woods. A hundred yards in, they found the people.
It was dark now, but not so dark that she couldn’t see them. There were twenty of them. She motioned them to come close. As they approached she noted that they were of all ages. Some appeared to be Jews; others didn’t. All of them looked haggard and badly frightened. They pressed tightly together, as though taking comfort from their proximity. “Will you try to walk very carefully,” she began, “taking care not to stumble or to step on anything that will break. Don’t walk on the road. Stay in the woods. Don’t crowd. Just follow the person in front of you.” She hesitated, wondering if it was even necessary to emphasize the seriousness of the moment, wondering whether anything she could say to these people would add to what they already felt. “This is the last short step to freedom,” she said at last. “Be very careful.” All of them nodded in unison.
They walked for a mile in the woods. Then Marushka halted the column. She motioned for the young men to approach. “Look, I can’t explain it, but I’ve got a bad feeling,” she told them. “I want you to get home. If anything happens, it will happen on your way back.” One of the young men began to argue, but Marushka held up her hand. “I know you were told that I was in charge. Please do as I say.” Without another word the two young men left. The column moved on. The group was being very good, but to Marushka their footfalls sounded like the pounding of timpanists.
At last they came to a clearing. Marushka held up her hand and they stopped. Then she beckoned and they came and huddled next to her again. She pointed to the clearing. “Look,” she whispered. In the broken light they could see a tiny shack next to some railroad tracks at a point where a dirt road crossed the tracks.
“You’re to hide in the woods on the other side, fifty meters from that shack. When the train comes, stay hidden until someone fetches you. You’ll be told what to do. Now move out, one at a time, and God be with you.”
One by one they crossed the clearing and disappeared into the woods on the other side. At last all was still.
Marushka would have liked to stay, to watch the operation. But her assignment was only halfway to completion. She’d been instructed to retrace her path now, in order to be certain no one had followed them. If she encountered a patrol she was to sidetrack it somehow, so that she would avert the danger from the people in the woods.
That bad feeling was still with her. Even though they had planned carefully, it did not seem logical that they should get away with the operation so easily. There were forced-labor camps in the area. The laborers were forever breaking out and the Germans forever tracking them with dogs. If it happened tonight the dogs could pick up the group’s scent.
The group. Marushka wondered who they were. Most of them Jews probably, but a few of them political dissidents. How wildly terror and hope must be warring in their minds now. They knew nothing about what would happen—only that they were being smuggled out of Germany.
It would happen any time now. A freight train bound for the north of Germany would make an unscheduled stop on the desolate stretch of track that cut through the woods. Suddenly a group of men the illegals hadn’t seen would rush from the woods and open one of the boxcars. Then they would break the seals on a number of large crates and carefully pry them open. There would be furniture in the crates, which they would remove and throw from the boxcar. At a signal the illegals would run from the woods, be lifted into the boxcar and placed inside the crates. The crates would be nailed up once more. Counterfeit seals would replace those that had been broken. The men would jump from the boxcar and close the door. The train would move down the track once more, bound for the port city of Lübeck. In the morning the crates would be loaded aboard a freighter. The next day they would be unloaded in Sweden. The furniture—property of Swedish diplomats and their families—would have long since been hauled into the woods and destroyed.
An exquisite operation. The best yet—if it worked. If it didn’t—well, she didn’t want to think about that. It would be very messy for all of them—for the Swede Erik Wesslen most of all. The operation had been his idea. He was the one who had smuggled a Jew out of Berlin to Sweden in a crate that was supposed to contain a piano. But she was the one who had said to him, after he’d told her the plan in an unguarded moment, “Well, get a pot under his behind or the piano will be leaking.”
Wesslen had said nothing more. He never said more than he had to. That was his operating principle. Except that he was under such strain, and he liked her so much, and she had proved to him many times over that she could keep a secret, and so she had become something of a safety valve for him. One day he’d told her that they were going to smuggle a big group out, and because he needed her help, he had to tell her the circumstances. The operation had suddenly become possible because the Germans had unexpectedly given th
e Swedish diplomats, whose families were being evacuated, permission to ship their furniture back to Sweden.
To make the plan work they would need the cooperation of the crew of the train on which the furniture was to be shipped. The crew would be told nothing of the plan of course; they would simply be asked to stop the train in the woods outside Berlin for the amount of time it would take to make the switch. Usually the men crewing trains were elderly, not such strong, pig-headed Nazis as the young trainmen who had gone off to war. Wesslen could offer something to the engineer and conductor for their cooperation—food, coffee, cigarettes, money. These days that was a lot.
Then there was the matter of the seals that would need to be broken. How could they be replaced? That was solved simply enough: a counterfeit stamp was copied from a used seal.
Then there was the matter of providing for the stowaways while they were crated in the lift vans. They would need food. They would need pots for their wastes. They would need codeine to suppress coughs.
And then Marushka brought up a point that had been overlooked. “Don’t forget that humans weigh far less than furniture. You’ll have to add some weights.”
“Good idea,” Wesslen said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Marushka had been brought into the operation only toward the end. The counterfeit seal had been obtained, the railway-men had been bribed, all was in readiness. It was then that Wesslen had asked her if she would lead the illegals through the woods.
“How will you get them to the woods?” she had asked.
“Never mind how,” he replied. “We’ll get them there. All you do is lead them.”
Now that part, at least, was over. She walked back through the woods in a stillness so deep that she could hear her own breathing. Just as she reached the edge of the woods she heard the sound of barking dogs. And then—or was it her imagination?—the thud of marching boots on pavement. Suddenly the darkness was pierced by a curtain of light thrown across the clearing a hundred yards ahead of her. She knew then that it wasn’t her imagination. Seconds later another curtain of light appeared behind her. She knew, without seeing the two other light curtains, that she was caught in a quadrangle—and, by the sound of their baying, that the dogs had picked up her scent.
In front of Marushka was a brook, and beyond it, if her nostrils told the truth, a pile of manure. Quickly she ran to the brook, leaped across it and raced to the manure pile. Then she buried her feet in the pile. When she was sure that her feet and legs were covered with manure, she ran back to the brook—effectively having stopped her scent at the pile. As rapidly as she could she waded with the current until she reached a pond that was overhung with trees. She swam to the far side and then waited under the trees until the sounds of the frustrated dogs receded. Only then did she lift herself onto the shore.
She no longer knew where she was. Even if she did, in her condition she would have to wait out at least the night, and then figure out a miracle that would get her back to Berlin. In the meanwhile she prayed that the illegals had fared better than she had. And she worried about Hans, who might almost die of worry when she didn’t come home. Her wet clothes clung to her skin and she was shaking uncontrollably from the cold, but she thought, Poor Hans—at least I know I’m alive.
It hadn’t been easy to keep the other half of her life hidden from the man she loved. But she had felt she had no alternative. She wasn’t at all sure that Hans would be able to withstand torture if the Gestapo ever caught him. More than her own life was at stake in the event that Hans broke and identified his benefactress, because Marushka was heavily involved with the resistance movement, and had been even before her relationship with Hans. “I love this country so much, and I’m just beside myself with what’s happening,” she confided miserably to a friend after the Nazis took power.
She was studying in Munich at the time, nearing a doctoral degree in natural history but wracking her brain at the same time for ways to combat this new political scourge. She played a small part in helping two outspoken opponents of the Nazis, one a priest, the other a genetics professor, to leave Germany just as they were about to be arrested. She worked briefly on a newspaper, whose editor taught her how to pass confidential information secretly to like-minded journalists throughout the country by writing between the lines of printing mats. And she broke with her brother, who had inherited the family estate and become a fervent Nazi. But publicly she maintained quite another profile—that of a charming, well-bred young countess who was splendid company at dinner parties and completely naïve about politics. Her seemingly innocent questions, asked of the high Nazi officials who were invariably present at embassy functions and high society dinners, produced harvests of useful information, which she passed along to other anti-Nazis.
She had made contact with these people almost immediately after arriving in Berlin from Munich in 1936, following a brief marriage to an architect. She had one narrow escape when she decided at the last minute not to attend an organizing meeting of opponents of the regime that was masked as a social tea. The next day she learned that everyone at the tea had been arrested. Later, because of her command of languages—she spoke English, French, Spanish and Greek—she was pressed into censorship work by the military. All of the correspondence of certain suspect persons came to her for review. After censoring the letters she would contact the writers privately and chastise them for being stupid and indiscreet. Then someone—she never learned who—reported her to the Gestapo for warning anti-Nazis. She was held several days but finally dismissed without charge, due in part to the fact that her superior was a family friend but also because she had raged so vociferously at being suspected as an enemy of the state that the Gestapo was glad to get rid of her. But in the meanwhile she had learned what the censors knew about finding hidden messages, and was able to relay that information to the resistance.
“Resistance” was the word they used, but it did not adequately convey the activity that went on. There was almost no resistance in the accepted sense of the term—saboteurs, assassins, provocateurs. Rather, almost all of the work was defensive, attempts to save the lives of endangered persons—Jews for the most part, but also political dissidents as well as those who were trying to help the oppressed. Much of this help came from individuals, who might offer nothing more than money or a hiding place for a fugitive to stay overnight. But most of the help came from several church groups, one German, the others Scandinavian. It was with one of the latter, the Church of Sweden, that Marushka became involved.
It had begun innocuously enough in a chance meeting with a Protestant priest named Sivkowicz at a 1939 birthday party for a mutual friend. In the course of their conversation Marushka suggested that the most valuable service persons like themselves could perform was to help people get away. Sivkowicz made no comment. A few moments later he drifted away. In the next half hour he did a lot of checking up on Marushka. As they parted he said, “About that thought you had. You might want to get in touch with the pastor at the Swedish church.”
A few days later Marushka called on the pastor, Birger Forell. He acted as though he didn’t quite understand what she was talking about. He said simply, “We’ll be in touch.”
Whatever it was that these Swedes were attempting, they couldn’t succeed without the help of Germans. An offer from a well placed countess with impeccable references was not to be taken lightly. Several weeks after her first contact with the church Marushka received a call from Forell. “There’s a man we know who needs a place to stay for a few days,” he said. “Do you suppose you could find him something?”
She passed that test, and several like it in the next few years, until finally, in 1942, she met Eric Wesslen. He was a young, almost cherubic-looking Swede, with atypically dark straight hair, who had originally come to Berlin earlier that year ostensibly to study landscape architecture. He had an informal relationship with the church as a sort of parish worker. Wesslen’s real work was to free certain people from the S.S.—
to “buy them back,” as he would say—then hide them and eventually export them. Many were Jews, but some were political people. He never explained his priorities. His contact was supposedly a high official of the S.S. He never told Marushka the man’s name, and she never asked him for it. He would simply say, “Tonight I’m getting some people back. Can you get them under a roof and find them some food?” She never asked who the people were. She had her one segment of the operation to perform, and that was it.
But gradually, as his respect for Marushka deepened, Wesslen came to rely on her more and more. Often it was Marushka who would propose whom to buy back. She would hear from her neighborhood sources—apartment managers, housewives, merchants, sometimes even the police—when a special person had been taken, and she would then tell Wesslen.
It was a dangerous game he was playing. He knew that if he was caught he could expect no help from the Swedish legation. He did not even like to contemplate the consequences. He simply kept to his task in as straightforward a manner as he could. “You have so-and-so,” he would say. “How much?”
The Last Jews in Berlin Page 17