When Papa Spaeth wasn’t there, we would talk to each other when we studied; we’d help each other, too, when it came time to memorize. Learning poems from the old masters and reciting them by heart was an art we were all required to learn. There was no question. How I wish it were still true! Those poems come to you when you need advice; they remind you of consequences and what is evil and what is kind. My favorites were, of course, those from Schiller and from Goethe, and Dieter and I practiced them at night. There were others, many of them, that I can still recite.
The ceilings in our Wohnung were taller than I’d seen before too, and there was sculpted crown molding around the edges. The doors were majestic—nearly twice as tall as a person—and had brass handles that required both hands to get the door to clink and swing open. Above the latch of each door was a keyhole with a huge brass key sticking in it.
III.
As early as 1933, when Hitler formally banned all parties other than the Nazi Party, the custom of raising the right arm in salute and pronouncing, emphatically, “Heil Hitler” was highly encouraged of all public employees. This included teachers. Each teacher was supposed to extend his right arm straight out in front, raise it at least to eye level, and shout loudly, “Heil Hitler!” And of course, we students were supposed to respond in like manner, especially when singing the national anthem.
However, some of my teachers refused. It was 1938, and it was Berlin. Things would change soon enough, but for now no one wanted this. My Maths teacher, in particular, was one who loathed this new thing, this right arm thing, this wrong thing, as he saw it. “What? Am I now sick?” I heard him say once, as he was explaining himself to another man. “Ich bin doch nicht krank!” and he stood his ground. As Heil also means “heal” in German, he was playing with the words. This Maths teacher kept his job, but only for a few more years, and then was sent into the Wehrmacht,6 surely against his will. I wonder if he survived.
Sometime later, after I was already finished with my Abitur—the exam that, if I passed, would allow me to go to university—our school changed dramatically. All teachers in all schools were replaced by loyal Partei teachers then. One in particular, a teacher Dieter had as a student, joined the Nazi Party just so he could keep his job. It was a sad thing, because, much later, after everything was finished and Hitler was dead and the war was over, this man could no longer find work. No one would hire a former Partei member. He hanged himself in his living room, right where everyone—his children and wife and others in his house—would surely see what he had done.
Although things were still rather loose in my school, and our principal was not fond of our regime either, we had been told that we should always salute with the Heil Hitler arm when we saw the Brownshirts, as we called the SA men, or the Blackshirts, for the SS uniform. As we often saw these men marching through the streets, my friends Hilde and Ilse and I just laughed at them. We thought they looked so strange with their self-importance. I mean, wasn’t this a city? With fashion and taste? And now this? Men in uniforms?
We preferred to cross the street whenever we saw them, so we would not have to be bothered. We were not about to Heil Hitler to anyone, anyway. Besides, once, one of these Brownshirts whistled at me and said, “Hallo, Fräulein! Wouldn’t you like to become a German mother?”
I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I knew it wasn’t meant kindly, that it was probably a sort of curse, something I should be frightened of, and I turned my eyes down to the street and crossed over to the other side. I did this very quickly and then took a deep breath. My face was red. I would never trust one of these Brownshirts; I wouldn’t. I would stay away and stay quiet. “Stay small.” That’s what I told myself, and it became important in days to come.
Walking along the Kurfürstendamm one afternoon, my friends Ilse and Hilde and I passed a store with male mannequins in the window. All of them were dressed in soldiers’ uniforms. There were the black ones and the brown ones, and the Luftwaffe uniforms that were a handsome gray wool, and even those for the Hitler Youth: brown shorts and shirt, and a tie and white kneesocks.
“Ah!” Hilde said, and giggled, remembering our principal’s directive. “I understand everything now! Look. There’s a brown one and there’s a black one too. I believe this means we should now salute the mannequins, right?” And then she did it, just as a prank, and we laughed so hard we nearly peed in our pants. We Heil Hitlered the mannequins in the window.
Had we only known what could have happened if we’d been caught, we never would have dared.
So my life as a fourteen-year-old in Nazi Germany, in 1938, was still relatively free. And I learned I was quite good at sports. I ran well until my running instructor told me I was not to run so fast. “It’s not good for a young woman to run too fast,” I was told. I swam well, too, and my swimming instructor said, “Just not much faster, Margarete. You’ll hurt your female organs, and you’ll not be able to bear children.” It was always like that: Women could train, but only so much.
I entered a number of competitions. Each one had medals like the Olympics—gold, silver, and bronze. In the summer of 1938, I competed in a national championship in Mecklenburg in West Pomerania, not so far from Berlin by train. We had to swim for sixty minutes, any style we liked—my favorite was the breaststroke—and I won my division. There were other sports, too, that I competed in. Running, 75 meters. Diving from the high board, 4.2 meters. I won the bronze medal for all sports combined.
Berlin had the Reichsportfeld, and it was not far from my house. It was the stadium Hitler was so proud of and the very same stadium where the 1936 Summer Olympics had been held. I wouldn’t know until years later what had happened there: Our Führer shook hands with only the German athletes and then left the stadium abruptly, presumably so he could avoid shaking hands with Jesse Owens, an American black man who had won four gold medals.
Now that I lived in Berlin and so close, within S-Bahn distance, to the Reichsportfeld, I wanted only to swim and become good enough for the next Olympic Games, which would be held in 1940—only two years away. I was strong and I was an athlete. That’s how I saw myself.
IV.
The Wandervogel, a name that meant something like Wandering Birds, was an organization with a long history. It was where young people learned crafts and songs, and they hiked together, and even camped in tents and learned to build campfires, much like the Boy or Girl Scouts.
Girls’ sports team, Mecklenburg. Margarete is at the bottom left.
By the time I came of age to join, at fourteen, the Wandervogel had already been renamed the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Organization for German Girls. And for the boys it was called the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Youth. They were nearly always referred to as the BDM and the HJ.
Joining the BDM was something I had longed for, not only to learn crafts and songs, but because I would be allowed to stay with my friends after school on those days we had our meetings. We met once a week from three to five o’clock. I learned to knit and crochet, and sometimes, on Saturdays, we went on long outings.
There was a song about the outdoors we learned that Dieter and I sang as we walked to catch the train to school, repeating the refrain over and over again until we reached the S-Bahn, singing and waving our hats about as we walked:
Faleri, falera, faleri,
Falera ha ha ha ha ha
Faleri, falera,
Und schwenke meinen Hut.
Later, the songs we learned in the BDM and the HJ were less about hiking and more about the Partei and our Führer and our loyalty to both. Later, it was even mandated that all children join at age fourteen. Here is where I could have seen what was happening, but I didn’t. At fourteen, I was thinking mostly of myself—and of boys.
Hilde was half Jewish, and she was not allowed to join the BDM.7 She said she had gone to the leader of my group and asked permission to join, and she was told, unequivocally, no. And now I must confess my response to Hilde’s tearful
complaint: “Why do you fuss? Why bother crying? It’s only one day in the week.”
“But I’m only half Jewish,” she wept that day as we walked down the street.
Margarete, right, with her friends in Berlin. “There was more to Berlin than school and sports and the BDM.”
“Don’t join, then,” is all I said.
Oh, how I’ve regretted that answer, that I didn’t pay attention that day, or on any of the days that followed, when I didn’t really listen to her pain.
My life, at fourteen, was ruled by dos and don’ts—“Margarete, you must do this” or “Margarete, you mustn’t do that”—and my focus was on obeying my parents and doing well in school. And so I dismissed Hilde’s pain. I can use the excuse that I was too young, and young people are often cruel to one another, but I just didn’t understand. I should have. Hilde was my friend, and a good friend, and the only one I had who was a Jude.
There was more to Berlin than school and sports and the BDM. I could now join the Tanzschule. It was a finishing school, literally a “dance school” for young men and women, and the idea thrilled me. It was here that we learned not only how to dance but all the facts that went along with it, the etiquette. The boy learned how to ask the girl to dance—he would bow slightly—and she would learn to curtsy and accept. Boys learned how to kiss a woman’s hand. We were always so nervous when the time came for this, but we got used to it and, in time, it was quite fun.
Ilse, Hilde, and I were inseparable. We attended the Tanzschule together, and we talked and gossiped. We flirted—we were allowed to do this here. And one time, a boy—his name was Karl—even gave me roses for my birthday, but that would not be for a few more years. We often teased each other, as we walked to the S-Bahn, about which boy liked whom better. “I can tell he likes you!” “I saw how he looked at you!” “He’s got love in his eyes! I can see it, the way he stays with you too long at the doorway, the way he watches you. I can see it!”
“Oh no! You’re wrong. You’re wrong!” And we’d blush because we knew we were, in fact, quite right. The boys were looking at us much too long, and this was exciting.
5
THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS
I.
It was now 1938, and I began to see signs everywhere that said jews not welcome or jews not allowed. I thought it was something that existed only in big cities like Berlin, because I had never seen such things in Swinemünde. But, in fact, signs against Jews suddenly appeared everywhere in Germany.
Across from our home was a store with a show window where one day I noticed such a sign had been pasted, large, across the front, saying jewish establishment. do not do business with jews. Next to it was another sign with very large letters, written in a peculiar style that gave the name of the owners: Friedleid, or Friedstein. And often now, next to both of these signs, there was an SA man standing, looking important in his brown uniform.
The store was a leather shop, which I passed every day on my way to the S-Bahn. They sold leather handbags and leather gloves and belts and things, and this sign puzzled me. What did “Jewish establishment” have to do with anything?
I decided I would find out. One afternoon, as I had just gotten off the train and was walking past the store, I stopped and turned, and then simply walked in right past the spot where yesterday I had seen that man with the strange-looking cap. A woman, kind, with a gentle smile, asked me how she could help. Her husband—I assumed it was her husband—stood by her side and smiled as well. There was a fragrance in the air of something expensive, like the shoes my Mutti liked to buy. It was the smell of leather, and everything was arranged elegantly. A purse with a silk scarf draped over it. A belt next to matching gloves in the same soft leather.
“Can we help?” they both asked in unison, and both of them came around the counter to shake my hand. Suddenly, I had no idea what to do. I wanted to say something like, My Mutti likes to wear soft gloves, and wouldn’t she love a leather handbag, and the silk scarf is so lovely … but nothing came to me. I realized I had no business whatsoever in a shop like this one. I had not a single Pfennig, and even if I did, what would I, a fourteen-year-old girl, want in a store such as this? I said only “Guten Tag”—“Have a good day”—and ran out the door. I was shy and ashamed of myself, and I was scared I would be scolded. For all I knew, Karl Spaeth could have been standing at the parlor window and seen what I had done. And so, red-faced, I ran. That was the last time I walked on that side of the street.
I still wonder: How did those shopkeepers feel? Weren’t they scared? If I had had the courage, I would have asked these things. I would have said what was in my heart. But I got no answers to those questions, because I never asked them.
They were quiet people. This I knew about them. I never saw them walking in the street as I did other neighbors. In fact, I never saw them other than that one time, and my parents never brought them up at the dinner table, either.
II.
I find it interesting that “Spaeth” also means “late” in German. It was the name of my stepfather, and I tell you this because I was becoming a woman. My body was growing up, and there were moments when I saw Karl notice. He was an unhappy man—this I knew. He was difficult, and he brooded often. His voice had become colder when he spoke to me. Sometimes I would see his eyes turn tiny and peer strangely at me from around the corners of the house. It frightened me, and so I stopped looking at him. He now often turned away from me, too, as I talked, as if what I said offended him. And so I stopped talking to him. It seemed he spent his days now finding reasons not to like me.
It came to this: He would beat me. It didn’t happen all at once; it came sporadically at first, and then, only a hard slap across the face. I thought it was because Mutti had allowed me to cut my hair short, and it was no longer in braids like a girl. Or perhaps it was because I had started attending the Tanzschule and was interested in womanly things, like the lipstick I wore once to a dance. Or that there were boys my age who sat beside me on the S-Bahn. Perhaps it was all these things, and I thought so because too often I heard him say, when telling a story about something he was displeased with, “And such behavior from a woman …” I began to believe all his stories were about me.
Then something happened. He surprised me at the door as I was coming home. The bird eyes of Karl Spaeth were squeezed into a squint, and he was holding a cane in his hand.
“What are you thinking, with your coat open like that?” he shouted, and then stepped forward and hit me across my back. I ran that time to my room and closed my door to him. I slammed it shut, and I began to hate him.
A week went by. I avoided him. I took my breakfast alone whenever possible. I tried to arrive home early and run to my room quietly. Perhaps being on time would make him less angry. But then it happened again. He was at the door when I came home, and I wasn’t even late. Eventually it became a common thing, seeing him at the door. He would use whatever he could find just there in the hallway when I walked in. A cane or an umbrella. “Why?” I would ask sometimes, as I hid my face from him to keep it from becoming bruised.
It was, I assumed, if not because I was late, then because my coat was open too wide. Or because my hair was messy, or because I laughed too loud. I never quite knew. The only answer he ever gave was “Because it’s time again.”
A day came when the authorities from the school wanted to know why. They came to our home and wanted to speak with my parents. They were concerned, they said, because I was always so black and blue and my eyes were always so swollen. Was there a problem in the home? I only heard about this visit when I came home from school later that day. The authorities had come and gone and Karl Spaeth was at the door once again, holding his cane. He beat me hard, and he ran after me and beat me even more. This time he said it was because I had turned him in to the Nazis.
It was rumored (I had never heard it, but I never paid much attention either) that we, the members of the HJ and the BDM, shou
ld listen well at home and report any discussions of “anti-loyalty.” Anti-loyalty? To what? To the Partei? I never listened much when these talks were held at the BDM either. They were always such nonsense. Quatsch. My girlfriends and I always sat in the back and played Käsekasten or a game we called Schafskopf, “sheep’s brain,” but its meaning is more like “dumb-ass” or something else. It must have been the “anti-indoctrination game” because we seem to have played it a lot during these meetings. We really never paid attention. It was all too stupid to listen to. Once our BDM leader caught us playing and she took our cards from us, but that was the extent of my involvement in the meetings.
To report my parents to the authorities, the idea of it, never crossed my mind. I was a grown-up girl, and I had my own ideas of right and wrong. The Nazis and their ideals never impressed me much, and neither, it seemed, did they impress my parents. My parents never spoke about the Nazis at home, or about Adolf Hitler. (Except that day I was beaten, when Karl Spaeth—I could no longer call him Papa—screamed that I was a “Nazi traitor,” of all things.) Not since we had moved to Berlin, anyway, did they speak of the Nazis, and besides, it was known now that opinions had become a thing of the past. Speaking out was against the law. Mutti had learned that all too well from the unidentified phone caller when we were still in Swinemünde.
III.
Again, I’ll tell you what I knew about the Jews. It was not much, and it was even less that I understood, but I did see this once. It was on the Kantstrasse, a fancy street with expensive shops: clothing stores and confectionary stores, stores for briefcases and leather coats, and pastry shops. The Kantstrasse was just around the corner from my S-Bahn station in Charlottenburg.
Letters From Berlin: A Story of War, Survival, and the Redeeming Power of Love and Friendship Page 5