Underground in Berlin (29 page)

Meanwhile, Trude’s search for another refuge for me was becoming more and more desperate. She would often leave the apartment for many hours, leaving me alone. Sometimes I shut the doors of the front hall so that no one could see me, and did gymnastics there.

Once, in such a situation, I decided to celebrate Passover. However, I would not let myself conjure up memories of Seder evenings in Rosenthaler Strasse, with all the family faces gathered round the large table. I celebrated my own, modern Passover by repeatedly singing Dayenu, the Passover song. The word means, ‘For us it would have been enough.’ Or more precisely, ‘If you had done this or that for us, it would have been enough.’ In my mind, I gratefully went through everything that I already had behind me, and that I had survived. I was confident that Trude would find somewhere for me.

She came home late, exhausted and discouraged. Her feet were swollen, and she asked me to fetch her a footstool. Pale and shaken, she told me how she had been visiting many of her women Party comrades, people she hadn’t seen for years. The women were startled to see Trude suddenly at the door, and they often let her in only reluctantly. Their menfolk had been in prison or a concentration camp for a very long time, and now they were being asked to take in a Jewish girl? ‘For God’s sake, we’re in such danger, in such want and poverty – that’s impossible.’ That was the answer she heard again and again. She had fared no better than Lieschen Sabbarth’s father in her search for shelter for me.

Then Trude leaned back, with half-closed eyes, and indulged in a fantasy of wishful thinking. She told me her fondest wish was for me to find refuge with the nobility. Graphically, she described a castle fit for Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by huge, tall trees and walls. She even described the flower beds. A cultivated old lady lived there, and my only task was to read French novels aloud to her. There was a small library that I could use to further my education. The old lady slept a great deal, and after her midday nap liked to be taken into the fresh air, but on no account was I to carry her out; there were plenty of servants who could do that in the castle. I was there only to read aloud.

Trude was alarmed when she realised what she had dreamed up for me. Normally she had nothing but contempt for the bourgeoisie – but in secret she still thought highly of the nobility, particularly its upper ranks.

It was Herbert Steinbeck, of all people, Trude’s neighbour and a Nazi non-commissioned officer, who had the crucial idea. He had suddenly arrived in Berlin for a few days’ leave. His wife, of course, had told him the sensational news of what was going on next door.

Soon she was at Trude’s door, saying, ‘My husband said that Jewish girl must go. But he also said he won’t denounce you. After Stalingrad, who knows how the war will turn out, and whether we may not need the communists one of these days?’

And Herbert Steinbeck had also thought of a way to get rid of ‘that Jewish girl’ as soon as possible.

Trude Neuke called him the crazy Dutchman. Gerrit Burgers was two years older than me, about half a head taller, and really rather good-looking. He was slim, had thick, light brown hair above a high forehead, expressive eyes and a thin face. His crooked teeth were less attractive; his front teeth were speckled with small brown marks. Striking characteristics were his quirks and his strange behaviour.

Out in the street, he always wore a wide-brimmed hat. Although he was slender and well built, he let his upper body lean slightly to the left. He always had a briefcase with him, slinging it round his neck on a strap so that it lay across his chest, bumping with every step he took. ‘An idiot,’ was Trude’s verdict, adding the contradictory comment, ‘And an intelligent man; you can have a good conversation with him.’

She had met Burgers when he went to lodge with her neighbours the Steinbecks. He had come to Berlin as a foreign worker, and judging by what Trude said was being robbed blind by his landlady. They had agreed that she would do his food shopping and cooking, but she kept most of his allotted rations as a manual labourer for herself and her husband. Burgers also had to clean their windows, take out the rubbish and so forth when he came home after a long day’s work. He put up with it because he wasn’t used to anything else; at home in the Netherlands his mother had always bossed him about.

His friendship with Trude and Jule Neuke began when he turned up at their front door in tears one day: Frau Steinbeck had locked him out. Burgers was prone to uncontrolled outbursts of emotion, and that day he poured out his heart to Trude. He had come to Germany voluntarily in search of work, but he was an opponent of the Nazis, so he felt at home in the Neukes’ kitchen. Even after he had moved to lodge with another landlady near the Oberbaum bridge, he regularly dropped in at Schönleinstrasse for a cup of ersatz coffee on a Saturday afternoon.

The Dutchman had never had a girlfriend in his life, because he simply dared not approach women. He had told Frau Steinbeck this before he knew anyone else in Berlin to talk to. She had made fun of him for it, in a mean, nasty way, and of course she had passed the information on to her husband. That had given Herbert Steinbeck the idea of getting him and me together.

Trude was to inform me of this plan, and seemed much embarrassed by it. What she was suggesting to me was by no means a fairy-tale castle set in a beautiful old estate. Clever as she was, however, she was quick to see the advantages of such an arrangement, which would be in the interests of both of us. And I would not owe anyone thanks, she added, in an obvious dig at Hannchen Koch.

When the Dutchman turned up at the Neukes’ apartment for ersatz coffee on the following Saturday afternoon, Trude sent me out of the room at first. A few minutes later she called me back into the kitchen. She hadn’t needed long to explain to Burgers what a chance of sexual liberation he had here. In addition, there was the prospect of a wife to keep house for him without stealing his provisions; his new landlady was no better than Frau Steinbeck there. He showed interest at once.

Trude introduced the man to me in her Berlin accent as ‘Jerrit Burjers’, but I knew how to pronounce his Dutch name properly as I greeted him politely and gave him my hand. I had gone to visit an aunt in Amsterdam on my fourteenth birthday, and had picked up a few scraps of Dutch. An inarticulate cry of delight escaped him, and he opened his mouth wide. Then, clumsily and with his mouth still wide open, he gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was a very wet, slobbering kiss, but it would have been tactless to wipe the saliva away.

He came from Nijmegen, a city on the Dutch border, and had already spoken a mixture of Dutch and German there. By now he had acquired a vocabulary that could be understood by anyone he addressed in Berlin. As Johanna was not my real name, he decided to call me Frauke, meaning ‘little wife’. ‘Frauke, let’s drink up and then we’ll both go home,’ he happily announced.

We went on foot from Schönleinstrasse to the River Spree. I kept my distance from the Dutchman. I found his appearance embarrassing, and I didn’t want either to attract notice or to have the passers by staring at me.

It was not far to the Oberbaum bridge, yet I had never been in this area before. I liked it very much at once. It had the typical atmosphere of Berlin. The Spree was my Spree, my river. I fervently hoped that this might represent a long-term solution for me.

The bridge led straight to a short street on the opposite bank of the Spree, where there were three apartment blocks in a row. We went into the middle one. I immediately felt at ease there, even in the front hall of the building. An old cardboard plate hanging on the banisters proclaimed that they were just polished, and I saw another such notice in the same hand, and like the first with spelling mistakes, informing everyone that when the air-raid warning sounded the cellar doors must be left open. I relished the phonetic reproduction of a genuine Berlin accent on both notices.

We went up the stairs. There was only one door on the first floor, with the name Knizek on it. ‘Just one tenant here?’ I asked Burgers.

‘Yes, this is a narrow house between the two big corner buildings,’ he explained.

‘How nice.’ I was pleased; the fewer neighbours the better.

A small handwritten card indicated that part of this first-floor apartment was occupied by a lodger. It read ‘KiHel’, a name that puzzled me. Later I found out that the man’s name was Kittel, but the two letters T had been crossed very close together and rather too low down, so that they looked like a capital H.

Herr and Frau Grass, the caretakers of the building, lived one floor higher up. Luise Blase, the Dutchman’s landlady, lived on the third floor. There was a fourth floor above that, but we did not go up there until later.

Before we left her apartment, Trude had taken me aside for a moment. ‘I’ve told Burgers that you’re half-Jewish, so you’ve had a lot of trouble and have had to go underground,’ she whispered to me. As it was to turn out, this was a brilliant idea, and was to make my survival in my new environment very much easier. With a cover story like that, I at least half belonged to the people I wanted to accept me into their world; I was not so alien that I must at all costs be kept out of it.

Frau Blase was seventy-eight years old, half blind and – as Burgers had told me on the way – an enthusiastic Nazi supporter. The Dutchman went straight to the point: he told her he had found a woman who was coming to live with him at once. I would keep house for him, and he said I was also ready to lend Frau Blase a hand at any time. Since I was not racially impeccable, it would be better not to register me with the police, he added casually. That didn’t seem to bother the old woman, but she immediately began haggling over the rent with Burgers. She wanted twice the original rent for his room if I was to share his broad wooden bed. The Dutchman thought that was too much, and finally they agreed to split the difference. With that, I moved in, and from the end of April 1943 my address was Number 2 Am Oberbaum.

I had liked the apartment when we first stepped into its roomy entrance hall, which led to the kitchen on the right, and on the left to the large, light front room occupied by Burgers. A connecting door led to a second room that was also rented out. A Pole and a Hungarian woman lived there, with their small child.

It was a few days before I discovered where Frau Blase had her own rooms. At first the way she sometimes just disappeared from the kitchen when I hadn’t seen her in the hall was a mystery to me. Only then did I discover that a narrow door in the kitchen resembling the door of a broom cupboard led to another small hall, leading in its turn into Frau Blase’s bedroom. There was a huge wardrobe in this communicating room. I was not to learn what precious treasures it contained until later.

On the day after I moved in, Frau Blase asked me to go shopping with her. She couldn’t leave the house or carry her purchases on her own. Either her son Kurt or the caretaker’s wife usually went with her.

She put on a good hat dating from the twenties and a pair of gloves, picked up a handbag and took my arm. She had dressed in her Sunday best for her first outing in a long time, which was also to be the last of her life.

The dairy lay on the opposite bank of the river. She introduced me to the milkman, one Herr Pofahl, as her new lodger. ‘How is your wife?’ she asked him. ‘Not so good,’ he replied briefly. When we had left the shop, Frau Blase told me that Frau Pofahl suffered from severe depression, and had been in an institution several times because of it.

Next time I went shopping on my own. ‘My regards to your landlady,’ said the milkman, ‘and tell her that we’re closing down on the first of next month. I can’t manage any more. My wife is in hospital again.’

Luise Blase was greatly affected by this information. ‘I won’t be going shopping any more,’ she announced, and gave me the ration cards for herself and Burgers, telling me to register them wherever I liked. As she saw it, the closure of the dairy marked the end of a section of her life. Gradually she handed over more and more responsibility for her housekeeping to me.

The first serious quarrel between Burgers and Frau Blase came as a complete surprise to me. The reason for it was ridiculous. The Dutchman had been washing himself thoroughly in the kitchen – as usual, and as I did too. There was in fact a bathroom, but the bath was full of coal.

Our landlady had tactfully withdrawn at first, and didn’t come back into the kitchen until Burgers had finished. But he had accidentally left a boot in the middle of the kitchen floor. Frau Blase, who was almost blind, stumbled over it and got a shock. ‘Only a filthy foreigner can be as slovenly as that,’ she protested angrily. ‘We Germans are neat and tidy!’ Burgers responded loudly and indignantly, because he was deeply hurt. He had such a pronounced passion for cleanliness that he was constantly disinfecting the toilet. And now the two of them were hurling the most vulgar abuse at each other for quite a long time. It was disgusting.

Then the old lady went beetroot red in the face, her lower jaw began to tremble, and she threatened to throw her Dutch lodger out. Even worse, she said she would denounce his ‘Jewish Dulcinea’ (that was me) to the Gestapo so that there’d be an end of me at last. She described exactly how she imagined that end, too, mingling a lust for murder with pornographic notions fit for
Der Stürmer
. She had never read a book in her life, so where she got her ideas was a mystery. She gave vent to terrible and sexually perverse threats of murder, while he shouted wildly at her, stamping his feet like a small child in a tantrum, tearing his hair and addressing her as ‘Mother’ in loud and sarcastic tones.