To add to my good fortune, the boss of the electric service, a communist who had returned from the camps, lived in my building and arranged to put us on the Russian grid. So, unlike most Germans in Brandenburg, we had light.
You will ask how we ate in those days, what we ate. I will tell you that it was like the English song: one got by with a little help from one’s friends.
I joined an organization, Victims of Fascism, full of people just like me, who had somehow survived. These were not just communists but other Jews who had existed as U-boats with falsified papers, or by hiding in the countryside, or escaping from the death marches or the camps. It meant everything to me to discover that I had not been the only one. We looked into each other’s faces and without a word we understood each other’s stories. The thing I had sought and found less and less in my successive trips to Vienna—surcease from lying and hiding and fear, someone who would understand—I now found among the Victims of Fascism.
My new friends gave me a bottle of wine. I traded it to a Russian soldier for a bottle of cooking oil, a deal that delighted both parties.
On a bread line, I befriended a woman of my age, named Agnes. When I was in the hospital, trying to recover on meager rations, she brought me something extra to eat every day. Her brother had been in the SS. Her husband—perhaps his name was Heinrich—was a communist who had spent ten years in the Orianenburg concentration camp. Toward the end of the war, he had escaped and found shelter with fellow communists who were distributing flyers to encourage foreign workers to commit acts of sabotage. Now he had become an official of the Brandenburg municipality, so highly placed in the Communist Party that he had a car.
Then there was Klessen the fisherman. During the war, he let the communists use his fishing boat as a floating headquarters where they printed anti-Nazi leaflets. Klessen had lost his youngest son at Stalingrad. One day a Nazi officer who chartered his boat was talking about the loss of lives at the front in such an uncaring manner that Klessen became enraged and shot him. Of course, he had to flee. He hid in the woods. The war ended. He came home.
The Russians trusted him. He and his wife became friends of mine. They gave me fish, vegetables, and potatoes—so much, in fact, that I had some left over to send to Tante Paula and my sister-in-law Gertrude in Berlin. Once Klessen came to my office with a bag of eels that he had caught in a secret trap. I put them into my desk drawer. I was conducting an interview with someone, and suddenly the desk began to shudder and shake, because even though they were dead, the eels were still jumping.
From the moment I joined the court, I made petitions to the Russian administration, called the Kommandatura, to get Werner out of Siberia.
“My husband is a German officer,” I said. “But he was captured only at the end of the war and saw almost no active duty. He is disabled, half-blind. He doesn’t deserve to be in a prison camp. He’s a good man who hid me and helped me. Please … let him out.”
Now, when you asked these Russians for something, they did not say yes or no; they said nothing, and you did not know what the outcome would be until it happened. So I kept asking and they kept saying nothing and I kept asking.
As the mail began to arrive again and as an occasional telephone began to work, I heard news of my friends and family. My little sister Hansi had arrived in Vienna with the British Army and knocked on Jultschi’s door. The happiness of their reunion spilled over into my pulverized little German city like a joyous flood. I heard that my cousin Elli was safe in London; that Mimi and Milo were safe in Palestine; that my cousin Max Sternbach, the artist, had survived by pretending to be a French prisoner; that Wolfgang and Ilse Roemer had been saved by the Quakers; that my cousins Vera and Alex Robichek had survived their Italian exile; that Uncle Richard and Aunt Roszi were safe in Sacramento.
Could I imagine that almost all the rest were murdered? My friends from Vienna, the girls from the Arbeitslager, dozens of relatives, all gone … could I even imagine that?
My work as a judge centered on children. Destitute German children were everywhere in those days, begging in train stations, sleeping on piles of rags on the pavement. Of course, they turned to lives of crime. They sold precious food on the black market. They sold their sisters and themselves. They stole whatever they could find to steal. These youngsters were brought before me at the family court. Remembering Osterburg, the best of my prisons, I never sent them to languish among hardened criminals, but I sentenced them instead to outside work—clearing the rubble, paving the streets.
The Russians searched the country for the children of Germans and slave laborers; took them from their mothers, natural or adoptive; and transported them to the Soviet Union. This was retaliation for the heartless kidnapping of thousands of Russian children by the Nazi forces, for slave labor or “Aryanized” lives in Germany.
However, a matter of policy for nations can be a matter of personal tragedy for individuals. This is what happened to Karla, my former upstairs neighbor, who came to see me at the court.
“Is it true you are a Jew, Grete?” she asked.
“Yes. My name is not Grete. It’s Edith.”
“So maybe I can tell you what my trouble is and you will understand. You know, my husband and I had no kids, but we could never get a baby because we were not members of the Nazi Party and the adoption agencies, which had so many babies, would never give one to us.”
“Ah, so that was why …”
“We found a child, the daughter of a French prisoner and a farm girl from East Prussia. We paid her family everything we could gather. And you know how much I love my little Elsie; she’s my whole life. But the Russians are taking away all these children now, Grete … I mean, Edith … and that was why we ran away so quickly before dawn like that …” (She lowered her eyes.) “Also to make room for my brother …”
“Yes, I understand.”
“I have broken so many laws, signed all kinds of false papers, to protect her identity and make people think she is my baby out of my body. But now all these children are being taken. And I am so afraid—not to go to jail; I would gladly go to jail—but to lose my child. Grete … I mean Edith … I will do anything not to lose my child. Can you help me?”
“Yes,” I said.
And I did. Finally it was my turn to save someone’s life.
One custody battle emerged over and over again. A German officer is in a prison camp. He has been divorced and his second wife is taking care of his children. The mother of the children says the father was a Nazi and not able to educate the children “in a democratic way,” and seeks sole custody.
I thought of my Werner in the Russian snows. I thought of Elisabeth trying to use this Russian occupation as an excuse to take little Bärbl away from him, and I never acquiesced in such an application. Never.
A very old judge, brought back from retirement, told me that during the war he had tried the case of a man who was half a Jew himself and married to an Aryan. When the Nazis forced this man to clean the streets, he shouted out horrible curses against Goebbels, the propaganda minister. The police were ready to drag him off to a concentration camp. But the old judge had only fined him for libel and told him, please, in the future, for the sake of his family, to keep his mouth shut.
In 1946, the daughter of this same Goebbels-curser came into my office and asked for help to emigrate to Palestine. A near-impossible request. There were almost a hundred thousand leftover Jews in Europe, wild to escape the continent where six million of their people had been incinerated. Britain would not let them into Palestine, much less a German Christian.
The girl went everywhere I could think to send her—to the American Joint Distribution Committee, to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to the British Consulate—and finally she got out to Israel. She married there. Her parents joined her and made their lives in this country.
MANY PEOPLE COMMITTED suicide at the end of the war, not just Goebbels and Hitler but my teacher from Vienna and her husband the Nazi judge a
nd my Latin teacher from the south Tirol. So when they brought me a woman who had tried to kill herself, I assumed she was a Nazi with a fear of the Gulag. She was babbling madly that I, only I, must be her lawyer.
The minute she walked into my office, I understood.
She was a woman whom I had met on the maternity service at the Städtische Krankenhaus—the one whose husband had raped and beaten her, the one who was afraid to go home. She was at the end of her rope—she had thrown her three children into the river and then jumped in after them. A Russian soldier had pulled her out. She was about to go on trial for murder.
The lawyer who had been assigned to her case withdrew, and I represented her. It was the only time I ever argued in court on behalf of any defendant.
“This is insanity,” I said. “Caused by sadistic cruelty beyond imagination. Who would not be insane after suffering this way? Who would not want to see her children dead rather than to continue a life of torture and agony? If my mother had known what would happen to me in my life, she would have murdered me the moment I was born.”
The woman was acquitted.
WANTING ANGELA TO have a playmate during my workday, and feeling that our new security must be shared, I arranged to board a little girl named Gretl. She and her brother lived at the orphanage. She called me “Auntie” and became like an older sister to Angela. Many nights, I made the girls supper, read them a story and tucked them in.
“When will Mommy come back, Auntie?”
“I’m not sure, Gretl.”
“And Papa, when will he come back?” Angela asked.
“They will both come back soon, children.”
“What is Papa like?”
I had told them a hundred times, but they always wanted to hear again. “Well, Papa is big. And strong. And very handsome. He can paint beautiful pictures. And he can eat more than all of us put together!”
They giggled. I kissed them good night. These are the perfect moments that live in my memory—the times when I saw those children fall asleep in peace and comfort, their eyelashes lying down on their faces.
For the first time in ten years, I had begun to feel real. I had a decent home for myself and my child. I had friends who understood me, with whom I could be myself, to whom I could say the truth of my heart. I had a wonderful job, which challenged me and enabled me to heal the world a little. My reality—the true Edith Hahn—was returning. I laughed again, argued again, dreamed of the future.
In my dream, Mama would come back. Of course, I said to myself, she would look older and would probably be exhausted from her long ordeal in the Polish ghetto. But soon, with rest and food and the love and care Angela and I would shower on her, she would be my witty, energetic mother again, and I would keep her with me always. We would never be separated.
In my dream, Werner would return. He would feel comfortable in our new home. He would find work as a painter and we would be a family again, maybe even have another child. I closed my eyes and imagined the little ones sitting down for lunch with big white napkins tucked under their chins.
Hilde Benjamin, a minister in the new government, called a meeting of the women judges every month in Berlin. During one of these trips, I contacted the American Joint Distribution Committee (the “Joint”), a group of American Jews trying to help the remnant of our people in Europe. The Joint began sending me monthly parcels: cigarettes that I could trade to a shoemaker for shoes for Angela, sanitary napkins, socks.
One time in Berlin, I saw an English soldier climbing a telephone pole, setting up phone lines between the Russian and British zones.
“I have a sister in the British Army,” I told him, “and my cousin in Vienna has given me her Feldposte number, her military address. But I cannot write to her because I am a civilian. Could you get a letter to her from me?”
He lowered himself down to the street, a polite British boy with freckles and protruding teeth. “Why certainly, madam, it will be my pleasure.”
I sat down on a ruined remnant of a staircase, wrote the letter, and gave it to him.
“Tell her if you see her that I am a judge in Brandenburg. Tell her that I am all right and that I love her … She is my baby sister … Tell her how my heart reaches out for her every day …”
In only a few weeks, my British soldier friend walked right into the courtroom and delivered a letter from Hansi. Thereafter, he became our go-between. She sent me elastic for my underwear and sewing needles and cod liver oil for all that ailed my adored little girl. She said she had been with the British Army in Egypt, assigned to interrogating captured German soldiers.
“You speak good German for a Brit,” one of them said. “Where’d you learn such good German?”
“I am asking the questions now,” answered Hansi.
Sweet victory.
IN THE AUTUMN of 1946, one of my colleagues told me about a transit camp in the French zone where Jewish survivors were gathering. Although I still kept Mama’s name on the radio every day, and no news of her had materialized, I thought I might find someone who knew of her in the camp. Besides, it was around Rosh Hashanah, and I longed to be with Jews. So I asked my superiors for a few days off, and the old communists let me go.
It was hell to travel at that time. The trains ran when it pleased Providence. Warnings painted in poison green told of the dread diseases you would catch if you dared use public transportation.
In the stations, serpentlike men offered stockings, coffee, chocolate, and cigarettes at black market prices. To walk in the streets you had to scale or somehow circumnavigate mountains of debris. Pipes rigged for heating protruded from holes in the buildings where windows had once been, emitting the terrifying smell of gas. Most of the time, on that arduous journey to the transit camp, I carried Angela and pushed the pram instead of pushing her in it.
I believe the camp may have been in a school. There were large rooms, full of beds, set up like a shelter after a hurricane or a flood. On one side, they housed the very old people and the little children. But perhaps the old people were not as old as they looked, because you see, they all looked as though they had been dug up from the grave—colorless, emaciated, toothless, shaking, staring. I carried Angela among them. They reached for her, just to touch her, a healthy child. My mother was not there.
I left Angela with one of the attendants and walked to the other side of the transit camp, where the younger people were. Grizzled men with stony eyes came up behind me and stroked my arms.
“Come here to my bed, sweetheart, I haven’t seen a woman like you since the beginning of time.”
“Get away from me! I am looking for my mother!”
“Are you a Jew? Where are you from?”
“I am a Jew. From Vienna. I am looking for Klothilde Hahn!”
They surrounded me. I was terrified. I could not see anybody to help me.
“Leave me alone!” I cried. “I am married. My husband is a prisoner of war. He is in Siberia. My child is here with me. I came only for Rosh Hashanah, to be with some Jews. How can you be Jews? This is not possible! I do not recognize you!”
One of them pulled my hair, yanked my head backward. He was tall, gaunt. He had a shaven head and black eyes set in watery reddish shells.
“So you married a German soldier, huh, bitch? This is why you look so good, so healthy and pink and clean.” He turned to his fellows. “How do you like this, comrades? She sleeps with the goyim. And now she’s too good to sleep with us.”
He spat at me. He had only one or two teeth in his mouth and they were like fangs.
It seemed to me that to get out of that place, I had to run a gauntlet of a thousand grabbing hands. How could these brutalized rapacious men be Jews? It was impossible! Where were the sober, mannerly yeshiva scholars from Poland that I remembered from Badgastein? Where were the refined young men with brilliant minds who went with me to the university? What had the monsters done to my people?
For the first time I experienced the awful, irrational guilt
that besets all survivors. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe my life as a U-boat did not weigh heavily on the scales of suffering, that the hideous experiences which had transformed the men in the transit camp might make it impossible for them ever to accept me as one of their own.
I could not stop trembling; I could not stop weeping.
I went back to the other side of the camp, to be with the old people, to help with the children, the orphans of this storm. I held them close to me; I let them play with Angela; I taught them little games to make them smile. With them I had some peace.
But for the journey home, my strength failed me. To drag and push Angela to the station again now seemed an impossible task. I left her with an attendant in the transit camp and said I would come back for her with a car.
At the station one of the black marketeers told me, “There is a train that passes through Brandenburg, but it’s a Russian train. Maybe a woman like you shouldn’t travel that way.”
I felt that I had no choice.
The train came. It was empty. “This is my train,” said the officer in charge. He had straight blond hair and Asian features. “If you want to travel with me, you have to go into a compartment.”
So I did. I was too nervous to sit down. I stood looking out the window. The Russian came and stood next to me and slipped his arm around my waist.
“I am not German,” I said. “I am Jewish.”
He took his arm away.
“There is a Jewish officer on board. He’s the boss of all the trains. Come on. I will take you to him.”
The Jewish officer had dark hair and eyes like my father’s and spoke to me in Yiddish.
“I don’t know Yiddish,” I said.
“Then you are not Jewish.”
“I came from Vienna. We never learned.”
“All the Jews from Vienna are dead. Gone. Murdered. You are a liar.”
“Shema Yisrael,” I said. “Adonai eloheynu. Adonai echod.”
I had not said it since my father’s funeral—ten years, time for a world to disappear. I bit my lip and choked on my tears. I leaned on his desk to keep from falling.
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