“Would you like some tea?” he heard Frau Jauch say. Her voice sounded calm. She seemed completely composed. The S.S. officers accepted with thanks. Frau Jauch left the room. Neither of the men spoke. Hans could hear their breathing. He was certain his own was audible; only because they suspected no other presence was it going undetected. But if he coughed …
He felt a tickle in his throat. He shut his eyes and willed his mind against it, constricting his throat, swallowing, praying. But the tickle persisted, and became more intense. Slowly, carefully, he took an enormous breath through his mouth and held it in his lungs, and at last he felt the tickle subside, just as Frau Jauch came in with the tea.
The pressure against him eased as the S.S. men leaned forward. Hans knew they must be picking up their tea. A moment later the couch pressed against him again as the visitors settled back. Hans could hear their slurping, and then one of them was telling Frau Jauch not to be excited or upset by the bombing. “We’ll win the war,” he assured her. “Everything will be over soon.”
Suddenly the tickle returned, so surprisingly and forcefully that Hans was sure he would cough. Again he opened his mouth and swallowed air, but this time it did no good. And then he heard Frau Jauch’s voice, and he thought, If I cough, it’s all over for her too.
He was gripping the knife so firmly now that his right hand shook from the effort and his nails dug into his palm. With the utmost care he moved his left hand to his throat and scratched the skin in the little hollow between the collarbones. Somehow that sensation seemed to draw his mind from the tickling in his throat.
Leave! he prayed. Leave!
Five minutes later they did. As soon as he heard the door close Hans began to cough. For a long while he couldn’t stop coughing or shaking.
At last the long winter ended. The frozen ground began to soften. The fruit trees flowered. Their fragrance filled the air—a scent as incongruous as perfume on a corpse. Anyone with the least amount of objective vision could see that Berlin was doomed, its life inexorably destroyed a little more each day by the fusillade of bombs.
One night a fire bomb landed thirty yards from Frau Jauch’s house and set a neighboring cottage on fire. A strong wind showered sparks directly onto her house, as well as many others. Hans could hear the neighbors outside agreeing that the only way to save the other cottages was to push down the one on fire. He knew that if he ran outside to help them they would wonder who he was. But if he didn’t go and the fire spread, he could burn to death. There was really no choice. He eased himself outside.
A few of the neighbors were fighting the fire with picks and shovels, but most of them worked with their bare hands, trying to drag away the parts of the house that hadn’t yet caught fire. The roof was the greatest problem; like those of the other cottages around it, it was covered with tar paper, and now the heat was melting the tar and turning it to liquid. As Hans grabbed a portion of the roof he could feel the tar burning the skin on his left hand.
As soon as he saw that the fire was under control Hans drew slowly back from the crowd, then turned and retreated to Frau Jauch’s house, making certain that no one was watching as he stepped through the door. Inside, he looked at his hand. The molten tar had burned away the skin on his palm and little finger. The pain was so intense and the burn so ugly that Hans knew he would have to see a doctor.
For the first time in more than a year he left the vicinity of Frau Jauch’s cottage and ran through the street, past the burning cottages and buildings, toward the S.S. hospital in Herzberge, two miles away. Leaving his sanctuary after all this time should have terrified him, but the pain drove everything else from his mind.
At the hospital he ran up to the admitting desk, cracked his arm into a salute and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” as he had seen the Nazis do so often.
“What is your name?” the receptionist said.
“Hans Busch,” Hans answered, giving the name of a Christian school friend he knew to be a soldier.
“Your papers?”
“I got burned while putting out a fire. I came straight here. My papers are at home.”
An S.S. doctor treated Hans’s hand. He instructed Hans to come back the next morning to have the bandage changed, and reminded him to bring his papers. Hans said he would.
“Heil Hitler,” the doctor said.
“Heil Hitler,” Hans said.
He did not return the next day.
29
HANS HIRSCHEL was once again experiencing life within the small space of Marushka’s three-room ground-floor flat on the Detmolder Strasse in Wilmersdorf. He did not dare to go outside lest he be spotted by a catcher. The only exception was a nightly visit to the yard, but it might as well have been a prison yard for all the sense of freedom it gave him. The small plot of ground was surrounded by apartment buildings; he could not look out, only up, into the black, unpromising sky.
Marushka was not much help either. She spent long hours at the animal protection society, where she had become the chief veterinarian. She would arrive home usually between seven and eight, have dinner, chat with Hans for a bit, and then go out again. She was still working, mostly with the Swedish church but sometimes on her own or with other groups, trying to find shelter for Jews and other illegals, getting them ration cards and phony identities. As a precaution she had arranged for her own false identity, a student card made out in the name of Maria Mueller. Other than her place of birth, all of the facts were the same as those on her legitimate papers, so that if she were questioned she would have no trouble remembering. During the day she carried her legal papers; in the evening she would change them for the false one. As Maria von Maltzan she would be a giveaway lead to the Gestapo if captured; as Maria Mueller she would not lead them back to Hans.
She was desperately tired, not simply from the long hours but from the incessant tension. The little triumphs kept her going. One day Hoffman, the police constable, came to the flat, ostensibly to investigate two complaints: first, that the dogs were making a racket, second, that Marushka had failed to display the Nazi flag on April 20, Hitler’s birthday. Regarding the first complaint, Marushka assured him that she was in the process of selling several of the dogs; regarding the second, she said, “I don’t have a flag. I have no money for flags.”
“I didn’t think you would have,” Hoffman said. They laughed together. He was the same constable who was so helpful to the Swedish church and Erik Perwe, and his views were well known to Marushka. He could have sent someone else around to investigate the complaint, but, in addition to protecting her, he had wanted to unburden himself. “I hate it,” he said now, sighing. “What they ask of us has nothing to do with human decency. Taking people from their flats whom I know to be decent people—what has this to do with order and justice?”
Marushka thought for a moment. “You know, it would be quite nice if you could manage to obtain a list of the people to be arrested, and give me some of the names in advance.”
Hoffman nodded. “That would be quite nice,” he said.
She got several people away that time, and the triumph fueled her spirit for days. But there were other, bitter, occasions, and these threw her into despair. A nurse at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin had come to the flat. Marushka had helped her to obtain papers from the German Red Cross authorizing her transfer, under an assumed name, from Berlin to a post near the Swiss frontier. From there she was to cross the frontier on foot with the help of underground allies. A fortnight after Marushka had put the nurse on the train she got word that she had gotten to the border undetected, but then, thinking she was across, had sat on a rock to eat her lunch and had been captured by a German border patrol. The news all but demolished Marushka. It was not simply a case of a life needlessly lost; it was an escape route permanently closed.
There was yet another cause of tension in the flat: money. Saving lives had become an unbelievably expensive proposition. Marushka’s salary, her black market activities and her annuity from the estate were
not nearly enough any longer to maintain herself, Hans and the steady stream of illegals who came to her door for help. More and more Marushka became fixated on the idea that the solution to her financial predicament was to be found in the family estate. The castle was packed with valuables, many of which might be sold for cash provided Marushka could persuade her brother’s wife to do so. Her brother, the rabid Nazi, had been killed in the French campaign in 1940. Years before, he had inherited the bulk of the estate on the death of their mother and had paid an ample sum to each of his three elder sisters, but nothing to Marushka, the youngest, who as a child had once almost drowned him for ordering the gardeners to kill the snakes. All that was in the past now; what mattered was to convert the estate and its valuables into cash and safe assets before everything was lost. One day late in the spring, after leaving the dogs with a friend and arranging for another friend to bring food to Hans each day, Marushka went off to Silesia for a week to try to talk some sense into her sister-in-law, who now effectively controlled the estate.
She returned and mournfully recounted the details of her trip to Hans. She had suggested to her sister-in-law that she sell all of the valuables, as well as the estate itself, if she could, distribute a certain amount of cash to the family, keep a reserve and use the very substantial remainder to buy land in Austria, where it could be gotten cheap. “You see, we’re losing the war,” she had argued, “and we will lose the estate as well as every other bloody thing we have unless we do something now.” Unfortunately her sister-in-law now had a boyfriend, an army man who had convinced her that Germany was winning the war.
Hans had never seen Marushka so defeated as she was after her return from Silesia. He did everything he could to cheer her up. When she finally did begin to come around, he credited his efforts somewhat, but he was sure that much of the boost had come from two other sources. The first of these was the litter of four Scotch terrier puppies, which, six weeks after their birth, had become the object of his adoration as well as Marushka’s. They named them Archibald, Anne, Amy and Andy. As the weeks passed and the puppies grew big enough to play, Hans and Marushka could forget the bombs and pressures and intrigues for a few moments a day. Neither mentioned what was on both their minds, that the puppies must soon be sold, for this was why they had been bred.
The second source of replenishment for Marushka’s spirit was the frequent appearances of her favorite nephew, Brumm—Friedrich Karl von Reichenau—son of her second sister, Alix, and Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, her baffling brother-in-law, one of the first, if not the first, important army officers to embrace the Nazis, who nonetheless knew of and liked Hans; who always came to Marushka’s flat when he was in Berlin to have several glasses of his favorite drink, Turk’s Blood, a half-and-half mixture of Burgundy and champagne; who once offered to give Marushka anything she wanted as a present and, when she told him she wanted a red cardinal, found one; who one day, just before his death of a stroke in January 1942, warned Marushka that even he would be unable to help her if she ran afoul of the Gestapo for associating with a Jew.
Walter von Reichenau’s son Brumm was no Nazi, and scarcely a soldier. He had forsaken a commission for duty as an enlisted man. He was in a combat unit, but he drove a motorbike, which had enabled him to avoid shooting at people he had no desire to kill. Until Russia. There, one day, he had driven into a small woods just retaken from the Russians by the Germans, and there he found many of his comrades smashed against trees by Russian tanks. The next morning Brumm’s unit captured some Russian troops and massacred them. Brumm killed his share. Later, back in Berlin on leave, he recounted the story to Marushka and confessed that he was thinking of suicide. She took Brumm into her arms and let him cry and assured him that war makes people go out of their minds. As sick as she was about what he had done, she was privately elated with this proof that there were decent young Germans.
Not that Marushka had ever really had doubts about her nephew. An exquisite skier, he had once, with the help of friends on the Austrian-Swiss border, arranged to have Jews escape to Switzerland on skis. Brought to trial on another occasion on a charge of conspiring with an anti-Nazi group—which, in fact, he had done—he had been spared only because the judge, awed by the knowledge of whose son Brumm was, had virtually put words into his mouth when he testified. “Surely you didn’t know with whom you had been,” the judge had said. “No, your honor,” Brumm had replied.
Now Brumm had come to Berlin on leave and had put up at Marushka’s apartment, which pleased her enormously because it gave her a chance to mother him, although he was only twelve years her junior. Brumm, a fantastically good-looking young man, was an inveterate womanizer; how or why Irmelin, his equally good-looking fiancée, put up with his escapades Marushka never understood. Yet, seeing them together, so young and beautiful, so obviously in love, Marushka stirred with hope that there was some future beyond all the pain.
30
FIVE MONTHS had passed since Fritz Croner’s escape from the Gestapo prison on the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. When he walked the streets now he did so with the knowledge that his face was known. After his escape he had vowed that the catchers would never arrest him again. His eyes methodically scanned the faces of the pedestrians coming his way, and his right hand remained in his coat pocket, loosely curled around the butt of a small pistol.
But rather than appear furtive, he had elected to be obvious. He had abandoned his cane at the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, and with it the limp he had affected. His disguise now was a style of dress that suggested a special importance. He wore his leather coat and trousers and boots in combination with a wide-brimmed gray felt hat encircled by a narrow band. It was a common enough hat, but it happened to be the kind that Gestapo agents wore, and they wore it differently from other people, the brim lower in front than in back. That was how Fritz wore his hat. If others surmised that he was from the Gestapo, so much the better.
Fritz continued to live in the store in Halensee. He came to Bayerische Strasse only late at night, in the twenty-minute interval between the radio announcement that Allied bombers were over Hannover and Braunschweig and the time they would arrive over Berlin. The warning almost always came at 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning. It was a distance of well over a mile, but by walking fast he could make it. In the shelter of the sturdy stone apartment building Marlitt would introduce Fritz as Wilhelm Kramer, a cousin of her husband, which explained, they hoped, the resemblance between him and Lane. Lane called him “Uncle Fritz,” as she had been taught to do from the time that she was two.
The cellar was dark and dank, and when a bomb exploded nearby, it was almost instantly filled with plaster dust, which set all of the inhabitants to coughing. The coughing, together with their fright, made them breathe even harder, which only compounded their problems. When the whistling of the bombs became very loud they would all cringe, waiting for the impact. After an hour one of the women might begin to cry, at which point those nearest her would try to reassure her. There was a feeling, unusual among a people not noted for their friendliness, that they were all in this together.
Each time Fritz entered the cellar he gave the Nazi salute. During the raids he often sat next to one of the tenants, Standartenfiihrer Adam, a calm middle-aged man with a military bearing, who was stationed outside Berlin but frequently arrived with his driver to spend the night in his flat on the first floor of the building.
“Why aren’t you in uniform?” Adam asked him one evening.
“It’s secret,” Fritz said sternly, which seemed to satisfy Adam, because he pursed his lips and nodded his understanding. As soon as he could, Fritz got hold of some technical drawings, mastered the terminology and, the next time he and Adam met in the cellar, confided that he worked in an aircraft factory just outside the city. At that point, in any case, he didn’t think Adam would press him; from what the man said and didn’t say, Fritz judged him to be a rational man with no love for the Nazis.
And then, early one morning,
after the all clear had sounded, Fritz left Marlitt and Lane and returned to Halensee, only to discover that the store had been demolished and with it everything he owned except what he was wearing and carrying—which, he thanked God, included the jewels. He had no alternative now except to move in with Marlitt and Lane, a mixed blessing that created grave new problems and risks.
All of the problems and risks of course stemmed from the fact that Fritz was not supposed to be in the building during the daytime, when he presumably worked at his secret job in the aircraft factory. This meant not only that he could not leave the building to conduct his business but that he could not go into the cellar shelter during the daytime air raids. Of the two, he did not really know which was worse. A bomb hit could kill him, but without money to live on the black market he might just as well be dead.
It did not take long to solve his business problem. Within a few weeks jewelers, most of them in uniform, were coming to the Bayerische Strasse apartment at the rate of one and two a day. They came ostensibly to see “Frau Krauser.” Fritz trusted them implicitly; he had known and dealt with all of them for years. In the jewelry trade the amounts of money involved were such that trust had to be either 100 percent or nothing. The jewelers came because, week after week, Fritz managed to have the best supply of jewels in Berlin. His source, unknown to anyone but Marlitt, was a courier for the Minister of Trade who, for a large commission, went back and forth each week between Amsterdam and Berlin. Fritz gave him 50,000 to 100,000 marks; he brought back English, Dutch and French gold coins, as well as gems.
The problem of shelter during the raids was something else again. Fritz would have to wait until all of the building’s residents had gone to the main shelter in the cellar. Then he would sneak down the stairs and into that part of the cellar in which the individual storage bins for each apartment were located. There he would sit and listen to the bombs and wonder what would happen if the building were hit. As buildings near theirs were demolished one by one, it became increasingly evident that he was pushing his luck.
The Last Jews in Berlin Page 23