The only catcher whose reputation exceeded Isaaksohn’s was the woman he had spoken to in the beauty parlor just after capturing Fritz. Her name was Stella Kübler; at the height of her activity she was just twenty years old, an extravagantly pretty woman who came to be called the “blond ghost.” Kübler and Isaaksohn often worked as a team; between them they were said to have accounted for the arrest of 2,300 Jews but that figure has never been corroborated.
Kübler was born Stella Goldflack in 1923. Her father was a well known composer, her mother a cabaret entertainer. During her schooldays she was always prominent and popular because of her good looks. She was particularly popular with a boy named Manfred Kübler. Stella and Manfred were married in 1941, but she was only eighteen at the time, and the marriage didn’t last. By 1943 Stella and her mother were working together in a large factory; they were at their jobs on February 27, but managed to avoid being taken in the roundup by hiding in a crate filled with sand. By morning they were near suffocation; the sound of their gasping attracted two foremen who were having breakfast on the crate.
There are contradictory accounts as to when Kübler began to work for the Gestapo and under what circumstances. One story is that she volunteered for the work after factory employees turned her and her mother in. Another story is that she was arrested with Isaaksohn in a cafe in March 1943 as he was in the process of selling her false identity papers for herself and her father. As proof of her willingness to cooperate with the Gestapo, she was asked by her interrogator, one S.S. Hauptscharführer Doberke, to denounce her husband. She did. Kübler agreed to work with Isaaksohn, and other catchers, one of them Fedor Friedlander, Fritz Croner’s tormentor.
Kübler’s greatest asset in her work was her attractive appearance. One day she stopped a man walking down the street and asked him to invite her to lunch because she hadn’t eaten anything for some time and didn’t have any money. As they sat in the restaurant she confided to him that she was an illegal Jew. He told her that he was too. A few minutes later Kübler excused herself to go to the powder room. Not long after that the Gestapo arrived.
That Kübler was troubled about her activities is indicated by the help she gave the Jews awaiting the transports, smuggling food and carrying mail in and out of the building.
By comparing notes with other Jews who had been caught, Fritz eventually surmised who it was who had caught him, and who the woman was who had been sitting under the hair dryer. Now that he understood what was happening, he had no doubt that the two men who had come to collect him at the police station that first evening of his capture were also Jews. Both had been young and dark and very tall. When they took him to the street, the light was so faint because of the dimout that again he thought about making a run for it. But once more a captor showed him a gun and said, “If you try to get away, I’ll shoot you on the spot.”
They took him to the Grosse Hamburger Strasse detention center. Inside, his interrogators told him to empty his briefcase and pockets. When he did, they gaped and then looked at him in astonishment. On the table before them was a small fortune in money and jewelry.
Fritz swallowed and looked away, fighting to maintain his composure. It was not money and jewelry he was giving up, it was life. He had always carried his valuables on his person in case the Gestapo raided one of his hiding places in his absence. Thank God, he thought, Marlitt has her half. That was how they had done it—sharing the custody of the valuables so that even if one was taken the other could still survive.
They returned his empty briefcase. Then they took him to the cellar of the building and put him in a small and crowded room and locked him up for the night.
For several days after his capture Fritz Croner was questioned by Jews. They were to him literally beneath contempt. Dreck, shit. The Gestapo were Germans, under orders to bring the Jews to Auschwitz. But the Jews who worked for the Gestapo were worse than the Gestapo. He mocked their efforts to obtain information from him.
His interrogators had obtained his record from the files of the Jewish community organization and knew therefore that he was married and had a child. It was obvious that all of their questions were directed toward learning the location of two more Jews.
“Where are your wife and child?” one of them asked him.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “My wife has been living with a German for some time now, and has kept the child away from me. It’s been months since I’ve seen them.”
“Where have you been living?”
“With whores on the Augsburger Strasse.”
“Where are your clothes?”
“In the luggage checkroom at the Bahnhof Zoo.”
“Then where is your claim check?”
“In my wallet.”
They looked in his wallet. There was no ticket.
“I’m sorry,” Fritz said, “but it was there when you took my wallet.”
“What does your luggage look like?”
Fritz described his suitcase for them—an invention, of course. Then they let him go.
Two days later the questioning resumed.
“There was no such suitcase in the checkroom,” one of his interrogators told him.
Fritz held out his hands. “I’m sure there wasn’t,” he said. “Whoever stole the ticket from my wallet has also stolen the suitcase.”
The interrogator glared at him angrily. Then he demanded to know where Fritz had obtained the ration cards he’d been carrying when he was arrested.
“I don’t know his name,” Fritz said, “but on the first day of every month I meet a man at the Bahnhof Zoo and pay him a thousand marks for the cards.” A thousand marks was, in fact, the going price for ration cards at the time.
“Describe the man.”
Fritz described an imaginary man. Then the interrogator dismissed him.
A few days later Fritz was summoned once more for questioning.
“No such man was there,” the interrogator said.
Once again Fritz shrugged. “All I can tell you is that for the last four months he has been there on the first of the month. I’m sure he took precautions. Undoubtedly, when he didn’t see me, he looked around and saw someone waiting and figured out what had happened.”
For hours on end it went like this, Fritz playing with his captors, inventing stories, telling them what they wanted to hear. The more he toyed with them, the smaller they became to him.
At last they made him an offer. “Name ten Jews who are living illegally, and tell us how to find them, and you can stay here until the end of the war.”
Fritz held out his hands, palms up. “I don’t know any illegal Jews,” he pleaded. “How many times must I tell you?”
Another day passed. Then, two weeks after he had arrived at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse building, Fritz received a visitor, a short, thin, coarse-looking man in his middle fifties.
“My name is Koplowitz,” he said. “May I sit down?”
Fritz indicated the cot. Koplowitz sat beside him, and gave him a look of commiseration that has passed between Jews for centuries, identifying himself as a fellow sufferer who understood the misery that Fritz was going through. He told Fritz that he was living in a privileged marriage—his wife was Gentile—and therefore not yet subject to deportation. He indicated that he did not expect this immunity to last forever. In the meanwhile he had been pressed into service by the Gestapo. It was not volunteer work, he stressed. It ate his insides out. His one consolation was that, in his hands, the work went more gently and with more consideration for those Jews he dealt with than if they were handled by the Gestapo.
Fritz listened in silence. He had a thought he would have liked to express. “And if you did not cooperate, whatever the consequences to yourself, all the Jews you’ve sent to the camps would still be free,” he would say. But he said nothing, only waiting to find out what it was Koplowitz would offer. He did not have long to wait.
Koplowitz spoke about how terrible the war was. He spoke about how ter
rible it was to be a Jew in Germany at this time. He spoke about how terrible it must be to go alone to Auschwitz and how much better it would be to be resettled as a family. Then he asked about Fritz’s family.
“I don’t know anything about my family,” Fritz said.
“But you must know.”
Fritz repeated the story he had told the others.
“Look,” Koplowitz said, putting a hand on Fritz’s knee, “I’m a Jew. You’re going to Auschwitz in the next few days. What can your wife and child do here alone without you? Either they’ll starve or they’ll be found. And then they’ll have to face their ordeal alone. Better you tell me where they are, and then they can go with you.”
Fritz held out his hands. “I tell you, I don’t know where they are. And if I did know, I wouldn’t want my wife to go with me. She’s a terrible woman. She deserted me. Imagine, a Jewish woman in this time taking up with a non-Jew.”
Koplowitz sagged visibly. “Maybe it’s true what you’re saying. But if it’s not true, let me make you an offer. If you will give me the names of two illegal Jews and their whereabouts, you can go visit your wife and child. How about it?”
“It’s impossible,” Fritz said. He almost felt sorry for the man—so coarse, so crude, so stupid, so willing to do anything to save his own precious skin.
Without another word Koplowitz walked from the room.
25
THERE WAS a famous Hungarian fortune teller in Berlin whom even certain Nazis would consult, although such a practice was illegal. Her name was Ursula Kardosch. She was a vivacious woman in her early forties, whom Marushka had met during her student days a decade before when she had accompanied a friend to an appointment at the fortune teller’s home. When they had finished, Frau Kardosch emerged, looked at Marushka and said, “You’ll have a place with lots of animals.” Over the years Marushka and Frau Kardosch became friends. One day Frau Kardosch told Marushka to check her bank account for two months, because she had been cheated. Marushka found the errors. Now, as 1943 was ending, the fortune teller sent her maid around to Marushka’s flat with a note. “Something around three o’clock,” it said. “I can’t see whether it will be day or night.”
Marushka was scarcely a superstitious woman, but she was bothered nonetheless. In the last few months, she knew, she had flirted with disaster. Getting those people onto the train for Sweden had nearly cost her life. Since then she’d become even more heavily involved in underground work. The number of illegal Jews living in the flat on any one night had risen dangerously. One night she counted twenty. They were there only briefly for the most part, until papers could be arranged. Traffic in counterfeit papers had become much more brisk as a consequence of the bombings. Out of fear that the city’s data bank on its residents would be destroyed, Berlin authorities had removed the central card file to a bunker outside the city, where it was effectively unusable. There was a second set of cards for residents, in the various police precinct stations around the city. It was their registration at these stations that entitled residents to live where they did and to obtain ration cards. But a number of these stations had been hit and their records destroyed. With the central data bank stored in the country, there was no way to verify identities in cases where the second set of cards had been destroyed. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to create new identities for Jews who had no papers at all.
Accompanied by someone who, for fifty marks or half a pound of butter, would attest to their identity, Jews would tell the authorities that they had lived in a building that had been destroyed, and that all personal papers had been destroyed as well. The address would have been chosen with care—a building that had been flattened or gutted by the bombs, its residents killed in the process. The Jews would explain that they had been in another part of the city when their buildings were hit. Some Jews would maintain that they had been bombed out in Hamburg, in the devastating August raid when 800,000 persons had been made homeless, and had moved to Berlin from there. Four months earlier that story might have been brought to the attention of the Gestapo, but so many persons had been made homeless by the bombings since then that it no longer aroused suspicion. To the contrary, a person who had been twice bombed out was a focus of great pity, and so the police would issue the new papers without much ado.
Although most policemen cooperated with the Gestapo, there were numerous police officers such as Mattek and Hoffman who disliked the Nazis for the same reason those two friends of the Swedish church did: the Nazis’ methods were not correct—certainly not for Prussians. By now Marushka and others working for the church knew who these sympathetic policemen were, knew which might even be willing, for a little bribe or sometimes even for nothing, to obtain blank documents with which the church could forge false identities. They had all become adept at transferring stamps from old documents to new ones, using hard-boiled eggs. But even that crude technique had become unnecessary for the most part, because a counterfeit rubber stamp had been fabricated in Sweden and smuggled back to Berlin.
So, all in all, as the daily pounding of the bombers kept the authorities focused on the increasing problems of a troubled citizenry, as the growing destruction and disorganization worked in their favor, many illegal Jews—far too many, in Marushka’s opinion—had not only begun to believe that they would survive the war, they had actually become bold and careless, endangering not only themselves but those who were helping them. You could scarcely blame the Jews; they had been cooped up for so long in their attics and basements and offices. But the Mundfunk told stories of Jews who had gone for their first walk outdoors in years only to be spotted by the catchers.
It was for many of these reasons that Marushka had finally evicted Hollander, Hans’s friend and former colleague, who had been living in the flat for almost a year. The man had insisted on leaving the flat during the day because this was the only time he could visit the woman with whom he was having an affair. Marushka had proposed to his lover that she keep Hollander during the week, and Marushka would personally escort him back to her flat for the weekend. But the woman was unwilling to take the chance, and Hollander was unwilling to discontinue his daytime visits, and so Marushka had had no other alternative but to send him packing. As badly as Hans felt, he not only supported the action but recommended it.
And now this note from the Hungarian fortune teller: “Something at three o’clock.” What? And when? In the afternoon? In the middle of the night? Today? Next week? Next month? Marushka could not let her life pivot on such an uncertainty, let alone one based on a vision. So she went about her life, a little more carefully, perhaps, but with the increasing conviction, as the days passed and nothing happened, that the vision had been just that.
And then one day it happened, at three in the afternoon.
It had been a good day for Marushka. She was always looking for ways to supplement the money she needed to feed Hans and the other illegals who occasionally congregated in her flat. This day she had found a treasure—a collection of leatherbound English books left by a Jewish woman who had emigrated before the war. A doctor had lent her his car to fetch the books, and now, at three in the afternoon, she was bringing them home. As she was carrying the first batch of books into her flat, a neighbor, the wife of a tailor, stopped her.
“I found this card with your name on it,” she said. “Is it of any use?” The woman handed Marushka a yellow card. On it, handwritten, were the words “Bei Maltzan wohnen J.”
Marushka could not believe what she saw. She knew the J stood for “Jews.” “Jews are living with Maltzan” was what that card said. She darted a look at the tailor’s wife. Was there the slightest sign of suspicion in her eyes? If there was, Marushka couldn’t see it. “Where did you find this?” she asked.
“On the floor. Two gentlemen came and asked for you early this afternoon. One of them must have dropped it.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said you were at work.”
Marushka mumbled her
thanks, turned and ran into the flat. She dumped the books on the kitchen counter and rushed into the sitting room. “For God’s sake, Hans, it’s the Gestapo,” she whispered. “Get into the couch.” The greeting he had been about to give her died on his lips. Without a word he rushed for the couch.
Marushka took several deep breaths to calm herself. In vain she tried to will her thundering heart into silence. At last she swallowed, and walked to the street to get another load of books.
It was then that she saw them—a woman and two men. The woman was young, blond, attractive, and fashionably dressed.
Out of the corner of her eye Marushka saw the two men move toward her as she picked up a fresh load of books. She carried the books into her flat. By the time she had dumped them on the kitchen table the men were at her back door. One was a small man, overdressed, wearing a gold bracelet and diamond ring. He was about thirty, and when he looked at her he scowled. The second man was about forty, blond, with an open, friendly look.
“We’re Gestapo,” the small man said.
“What do you want from me?”
“We understand that you have Jews living here.”
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
“We know that a Jewish girl used your place for two weeks.”
Marushka gaped at them. “That’s simply not true.”
“Do you deny that a girl lived here?” the small man asked.
“No. A girl did live here. But she wasn’t Jewish. She had perfectly good papers.”
“Those papers were forgeries.”
Marushka threw up her hands. “How should I have known that?”
The little man looked at her contemptuously. “The girl was not the only one. We know you’ve been hiding Jews.”
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