The Last Jews in Berlin

by Gross, Leonard;

  Myrgren shook his head. “You have no reason to be afraid,” he said. “The war will be over soon. The Gestapo’s too busy. They’ll never get around to you. Just don’t go.”

  40

  DEATH WAS EVERYWHERE NOW. Bodies lay in doorways after every raid, dragged there by survivors. Hours later burial details would appear to cart the bodies off, not to graves but to funeral pyres. There were too many dead for graves.

  Each day there were stories of more deaths in the newspapers, but Hans and Marushka read the stories with the same sense of resignation with which they might read of an increase in the price of bread. They had passed the point of feeling—or so they thought, at least—until word reached them that Irmelin, Brumm’s fiancée, had been killed in an air raid.

  She had stood the war so much better than all of them that her death seemed particularly unjust. She had never complained of discomfort, never broadcast her fears. She’d been the one they’d always counted on to walk the dogs or run the countless errands that neither one of them could do—Hans because he was hiding and Marushka because she was working. All she had asked in exchange was to be part of the household when Brumm was in Berlin. Now they could not imagine Brumm’s presence without his exquisite fiancée, so wise beyond her years. Seeing their love had measurably strengthened their own belief that a future existed for them all. Now that belief had been assailed and—for days after they heard the news—all but destroyed.

  Once, after their baby had died, Marushka had argued to Hans that every life, no matter how brief, had a purpose. As senseless as Irmelin’s death seemed, it did soon fill Marushka with a sense of purpose. Brumm had been wounded again—a piece of shrapnel had lodged in his hand—and evacuated to an overcrowded military hospital near Berlin. Marushka was determined that her nephew would never fight again. She went to the hospital and looked up the chief medical officer. “I have a proposition to put to you,” she told him. “Let me take my nephew back to my flat. I’ll tend to his wound, and you’ll have a free bed.” The doctor was delighted. As soon as Brumm was in the flat Marushka infected the wound with a culture from a diseased animal. Then she carefully rebound the bandage. Within two days Brumm’s hand was so swollen that he could not have possibly handled a weapon; it would be weeks before he would be fit for duty again, and by then, presumably, the war would be over.

  Certainly the final scene of the tragedy seemed about to be performed. The Yalta Conference had just ended. It was no secret in Berlin that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had pledged a final coordinated attack on Germany from all sides. In the east the Russians had already penetrated the Reich. In the west the Americans and British had launched their massive assault on the Rhine. There was no doubt whatever about the outcome of the tragedy. It was evident from everything that had gone before that Hitler would fight to the end, regardless of the cost. Berlin would be defended, and Berlin would be destroyed.

  For the thousands of helpless Berliners the one overriding task was to avoid being destroyed with their city.

  Her success in keeping her nephew out of further combat emboldened Marushka to try to help a number of acquaintances who, for one reason or another, had avoided the draft but were now being called up for the defense of Berlin. In her practice she had frequently used a somewhat unorthodox treatment for restoring the paralyzed limbs of animals. The animals were deliberately injected with a serum designed to produce jaundice. The jaundice produced a high fever, which spread through the body; that, in turn, caused blood to flow to the fevered parts. It was the flow of blood that restored the limb, and once that happened the jaundice could be cured. Why not induce jaundice in her friends, Marushka asked herself. A number of them agreed to the plan. For good measure she gave them a second injection to induce diarrhea and vomiting.

  Some days later a doctor she knew stopped Marushka on the street. “There’s the damndest bug running around,” he told her. “High fever, symptoms of jaundice—God knows where that came from—accompanied by diarrhea and vomiting. We’re seeing it only in men—and two days after we’ve cured them they’re sick again.”

  “Odd,” Marushka said,

  And then one day a small and sickly-looking German in his thirties came to see her at the flat. He had a heart condition that had kept him out of the service, he explained, but now he was being conscripted along with everyone else. He’d heard about the injections she’d been giving. He was afraid to take those because of his heart condition, but could she possibly break his arm?

  “I’d really prefer not to do that,” Marushka said.

  “I want you to do it,” he insisted.

  Marushka sighed. “As you wish,” she said. She drew a chair next to the stove, sat him down and tied him so that he wouldn’t fall. Then she put him out with a dose of ether. Next she placed two bricks on the stove, and then placed his left arm so that his elbow rested on one brick and his wrist on the other. Then she took an axe and hit his forearm with the dull end. Nothing happened. She swung again, and again nothing happened. She knew what was wrong; she wasn’t swinging hard enough; she couldn’t bring herself to inflict that kind of pain on a human being.

  Out came Hans, wearing his dressing gown and pajamas. “Here, let me do it,” he said. He picked up the axe and raised it over his head.

  Marushka screamed. “Not with the blade, you idiot.”

  Startled, Hans checked his swing. He looked first at Marushka, then at the axe, then back at Marushka, a sheepish look on his face.

  Marushka put a hand to her heart. Then suddenly she laughed. In a moment they were both laughing so hard that they had to lean against the wall.

  At last Hans gave the man’s arm a whack with the dull end of the head. “I think you’ve cracked it,” Marushka said. When he awakened he thought so too. He couldn’t have been happier.

  There was a small farewell party in the cellar of the Swedish church on the night of April 10. The guests of honor were Martin and Margot Weissenberg, who, after hiding in the church for two years and one month, were to fly to Stockholm the next day as Martin and Margot Berg, citizens of Sweden—provided their passports passed the controls at the airport. The Weissenbergs were jumpy, which was why Erik Myrgren had organized the party. He played his lute and sang songs, hoping to calm them down. It helped, but not enough. It was obvious from the faraway look in their eyes that their minds were on the following morning, when they would be putting their lives on the line.

  The lives of those who had conspired to make the journey possible were equally at risk. It was Erik Wesslen who had begun the arrangements in mid-March, when it became easier to get passports from the Swedish legation. The affair had been handled through a junior member of the legation, supposedly without the minister’s knowledge. Yet even Wesslen wasn’t certain whether the minister knew. The passports had come through the week before. There remained the problem of travel permits. They’d asked Officer Mattek from the police station across the street if he could help. “I’ll try,” he said. A few days later he appeared with the permits. He’d gotten them from “a friend,” he said with a little smile. He wouldn’t say more.

  Myrgren played and sang late into the night. Finally he put his lute aside and, motioning the Weissenbergs closer, he said softly, “Look, I’m positive it will succeed. Things are much easier now. We have good contacts at the airport.”

  In spite of Myrgren’s efforts, the Weissenbergs did not sleep well that night. Early the next morning Myrgren, Wesslen and the Weissenbergs drove to the Tempelhof airfield in the church’s car, a DKW. It was the first time the Weissenbergs had been outside the church in more than a year. The daily Allied bombings had been as much a part of their lives as anyone else’s, but there was no way they could have imagined the devastation that had been wrought. As they drove the four kilometers through Schöneberg to the Tempelhof airfield, passing street after street of gutted buildings, Martin Weissenberg could only say, over and over again, “My God! My God!”

  There was almost no t
raffic, but their pace was maddeningly slow nonetheless because the streets were clotted with fallen trees, rubble and wrecked cars. Twenty minutes passed before they reached the field. Inside the terminal they found Helje Klintborn, the twenty-eight-year-old Berlin representative of ABA, the Swedish airline. Without a word Martin Weissenberg handed their documents to Klintborn, who took them to the police. Then the two Jews and two Swedes went off to the center of the big terminal building and waited, trying without much success to make small talk. Erik Myrgren smoked one cigarette after another.

  Ten cigarette butts were lying at his feet when Klintborn emerged from the control office. He smiled lightly and waved the documents at them. Somehow they all managed to hold back their tears. But when the flight was called, they all embraced. Then Klintborn took the Weissenbergs on board.

  After the takeoff the Swedes waited in the airport until they could no longer see the plane.

  At sundown on April 16 Fritz and Marlitt Croner stood before a table on which stood a single glass of wine and a plate of boiled potatoes. There was no parsley or lamb bone or bitter herbs or any of the other symbolic foods used by the Jews for the last three thousand years to celebrate the Passover. Nor, for the first time, did they have any matzoh, the unleavened bread that the Jews had carried with them into the desert in their hurried flight from Egypt; the supply that the Croners had retrieved from their apartment on Christmas Eve of 1942 had been finished the previous year.

  It didn’t matter. Both Fritz and Marlitt felt a closer kinship than they ever had before with the ancestors who had struck out against such odds in search of the Promised Land. As Fritz opened the haggadah and began to read the prayers, each word somehow seemed to be telling not only the story of the Exodus but of their own flight to freedom as well—a flight that had begun in December of 1942 and was now in its twenty-ninth month, a flight in which, like the Jews fleeing Egypt, they had been pursued not only by the enemy but by their own paralyzing doubts. Now, believing that their deliverance was imminent, they prayed:

  Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, that Thou hast given us life and sustenance, and brought us to this season.

  41

  FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS Ruth Thomas had been accepted as an “Aryan.” At a client’s house on April 20, 1944, as she was fitting a dress, she’d even been offered some wine and asked to join the others in a birthday toast to the Führer. But since the day she had fled her catcher she had never walked the streets without searching the crowd for his face—or for any eyes directed at her, for that matter, eyes that might belong to other Jewish turncoats. Now, in mid-April 1945, the prospect of exposure as a Jew, forbidding as it was, paled before the new crisis that confronted Ruth and Mother.

  They were running out of food.

  For weeks they had been rationing their remaining supplies, eating so little that they both felt weak and dizzy. Try as she might, Ruth could not keep herself from thinking about food and plotting ways to get it. Each day that the jaws of the Allied vise closed in on Berlin, the center of Ruth’s universe, her stomach, seemed to constrict as well. Their supply of food could not last another two days. And even if they were miraculously to find food for sale in Berlin, they were without money to buy it. All of the valuables they had carried away with them the night they went into hiding were gone, sold long ago to raise money for the purchase of black market food. To the east, the Russians had reached the Oder River, thirty miles from Berlin. To the west, the Americans were approaching the Elbe River, fifty miles from the city. At the rate the Allied armies had been advancing, they could be at the outskirts of Berlin within a week. But so far as Ruth knew, the city itself was a fortress. It could be another two months before the war would end. After all they had surmounted—thirty months of hiding in the very stronghold of their enemies—how ironic to die of starvation.

  There was only one recourse: to go to the farm owned by the parents of Hilde Hohn, the S.S. officer’s wife who had taken her in when she’d first gone underground. It was a recourse, however, fraught with danger. The farm was near the Elbe, at the other end of a no-man’s-land blasted daily by bombs.

  Hilde refused to go. She was petrified by the bombs. The raids on Berlin were bad enough, but at least there she could go to a shelter before the bombs began to fall. If she made the trip, she would have no certain shelter and no advance warning of the raids.

  But someone would have to go or all of them would starve. Hilde looked at Ruth. “Will you do it?” she said. “If you’ll do it, I’ll get the tickets.”

  “I’ll do it,” Ruth said.

  Herr Barsch, Hilde’s father, didn’t want Ruth to go alone. He could not conceive of a woman making that trip by herself—a Jewish woman least of all. The police frequently boarded trains to look for deserters and underground Jews. Herr Barsch offered to accompany Ruth. They agreed to meet at the Bahnhof Zoo.

  That day the British came over and dropped hundreds of bombs. A Luftwaffe officer Hilde knew took Ruth to his shelter. Hilde arrived with the tickets, some money and a special request that she nervously confided to Ruth. She had no way of knowing for certain, she whispered, but she had a premonition that her husband would be turning up soon in Berlin. If he did, his S.S. officer’s uniform meant certain death. His only chance to survive was by passing as a civilian. Would Ruth bring back a business suit of her husband’s as well as some old civilian identity papers?

  What an irony—helping to save an S.S. officer’s life! But Ruth said nothing to Hilde, because she herself would not be alive if Hilde hadn’t helped her.

  As soon as the all clear sounded, the officer took Ruth to the Bahnhof Zoo. She wasn’t surprised when Herr Barsch didn’t appear. She decided to go alone.

  Bedlam awaited Ruth in Stendal, the first stop on her journey. The town had just been hit hard by the bombers. The waiting room of the station was so jammed with people trying to get out of town that Ruth could scarcely move. The power lines were down and there was no electricity. The room was lighted by candles, which cast a drab light over the people and made them seem like ghosts. A soldier standing next to Ruth asked her if she was hungry. When she said that she was, he gave her an apple and some bread. At last she found a space to rest next to some exhausted children. Lying there, munching her food, watching the ghostlike people, Ruth thought of how God had caused the waters of the Red Sea to close over the Egyptians after he had parted them for the Jews. Throughout her ordeal she hadn’t prayed, but a line from Exodus now leaped to her mind: “The horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.”

  Then another fleet of bombers came over the town and began to drop its cargo. The station emptied swiftly. Ruth left with the others, not so much because she feared the bombs but because she was less likely to be detected as long as she stayed with the crowd. Besides, she was sure there would be no train going from Stendal that night.

  She walked to the main road and waved down an army truck. The driver took her a few miles along the road. Then she hitched a ride on a horse-drawn cart. It had been hours since she’d had anything to eat. She went to the restaurant in the next town and told the manager that she had money but no ration cards. The manager served her some soup.

  Finally the train for Werben came. She boarded, and the train set out. But they were scarcely out of town when the bombing started again. The train braked so abruptly that the passengers were thrown violently forward. They fled to the woods, Ruth with them. As the planes made their bombing runs Ruth prayed, “Dear God, don’t let them hit the locomotive.”

  She was not in the least worried about herself. The bombs didn’t bother her, and never had. Had she not been practically forced to go into a shelter during air raids, she would have gone for walks. “These bombs are not meant for us,” she and Mother always told each other. It was a horrible kind of positivism, but it worked.

  Once again her prayers were answered. She boarded the train, and was soon in Werben. From there she walked the rest of the way to the farm
.

  Frau Hohn, Hilde’s mother-in-law, was overjoyed to see Ruth. She said she’d been praying to her saint for Ruth’s safety. She put Ruth, now clearly exhausted, to bed. When Ruth awakened, Herr Barsch was there. He’d caught the same train from the Bahnhof Zoo but had been unable to find her. His own journey had been as hazardous as Ruth’s, and he was visibly upset.

  All that day, as Ruth rested for the return journey, Frau Hohn argued strenuously against the trip. The Americans would reach them any day, she pointed out, and when that happened, the war would be over for them, regardless of what happened in Berlin. The battle for Berlin would be the worst one of the war, she was certain. If Ruth returned, she could be killed in the fighting or by the bombs. If neither of those things happened, she might eventually starve to death. At the very least, she would be raped by the Russians. “The Russians won’t let even a mouse out of Berlin alive. Wait for the Americans,” Frau Hohn counseled.

  Her advice gave Ruth no comfort. For weeks the Völkischer Beobachter had been filled with headlines about the savage treatment of German women by Russian troops. A seventy-year-old woman raped. A nun ravished twenty-four times. Ruth had no illusions about those headlines; she was sure they were fabrications. Still, the subject had been raised frequently among the women in whose homes she sewed. The specific word “rape” was never used; the women always referred to “it.” Surely “it” had happened to German women along the conqueror’s path. Surely these conquerors had in mind the treatment accorded their women during the invasion of Russia by the German Army. And even assuming she could successfully avoid “it,” how was she to survive? There was another rumor abroad in Berlin: when the Russians arrived they would seize all available food and starve the Berliners for two months.