The Last Jews in Berlin Read online

  He had many clients. As German currency continued to lose its value, the value of jewelry rose. People who had never owned jewelry now bought it. Much of the buying was done in the larger stores, but those stores relied on go-betweens such as Fritz Croner to keep them supplied with merchandise. A large store would ask him if he could find a good one-karat stone. He would comb the smaller stores and the wares of private gem dealers until he found what he wanted at a good price. Then he would sell the stone to the larger store. In this manner he could earn hundreds of marks—sometimes in a single day. There were days when he walked the streets with five thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry in his pockets.

  Not even the order to wear Jewish stars on their clothes starting September 19, 1941, put a crimp in Fritz’s business. Marlitt pinned the stars to their clothes; they would wear the stars when they walked the streets of their neighborhood, but remove them as soon as they left its boundaries. What they were doing was strictly illegal, and they knew it, but they had made plans for any challenge.

  One day in December 1941 a policeman appeared at their apartment. He said that an anonymous informant had denounced both of them for failing to wear their stars.

  “Your informant doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Fritz said. “Here, look.” He showed the policeman two coats on which Marlitt had securely sewn the stars—and which they always left on hooks by the door. The policeman tugged at the stars, shrugged and departed. The Croners never saw him again.

  But it was episodes like these that made Fritz realize that going underground was inevitable. He was sure that events would tell him when the day was at hand. On the morning of December 3, 1942, he went as usual to his job at the railroad yard; there two Jewish colleagues showed him notices they had received from the Jewish community headquarters ordering them to remain at home that day for “statistical reasons.” The only statistical reasons Fritz could imagine would be those supplied by the Gestapo, which, periodically since October 1941, had required the Jewish community to supply a specified number of Jews for “resettlement.”

  Fritz said nothing to his fellow workers. He watched them present their notices to the foreman, who excused them to go home. Then he approached the foreman. “I received the same notice,” he said. His bluff worked; the foreman didn’t ask to see the notice. Instead, with a nod and a wave and what Fritz suspected was a knowing look, he excused him for the day.

  Two hours after he had left for work Fritz was back home. Marlitt had just put Lane down for her nap. At the sight of her husband she paled.

  “It’s time,” he said simply.

  Marlitt nodded. Then she immediately began to hide clothing and provisions for Lane in the baby carriage. Their own clothing would be left behind. The only possessions they would take with them were the jewels Fritz had guarded for this moment. These too would be hidden in the baby’s carriage.

  The next problem to solve concerned Fritz’s family. (Marlitt’s father and two sisters had managed to emigrate to Shanghai several years before.) Fritz sent word to his parents and his uncle, his mother’s brother, to come to his apartment at seven o’clock that evening, an hour before the curfew for Jews. Then he set out for the apartment of a Frau Kosimer, a woman of seventy he had met through a stateless Russian-born jeweler named Makarow. The distance was less than a mile, normally a pleasant ten-minute walk along tree-lined streets whose buildings had not yet been hit by the bombs. Today Fritz felt as if he could make the journey in less than half that time. But while anxiety urged him on, prudence restrained his gait. He knew that his behavior mustn’t seem abnormal to anyone who observed him.

  Frau Kosimer was a widow who had been living in Berlin since 1938. Her husband, a Jew, had been killed when the Germans occupied Austria in March of that year. She had moved to Berlin to be near her best friend. The authorization she brought with her noted that she was Catholic, and accordingly her resettlement was accepted without question.

  For several years now Fritz and the Russian Makarow had been using Frau Kosimer’s apartment as a rendezvous where they could trade jewels in private and had been paying Frau Kosimer for the privilege. Their business had always been conducted in the late afternoon or early evening, so when she saw him at her doorway at this early hour, the thin lines in her angular face, more youthful than her years, deepened into creases. Months before, when the deportations had quickened, Frau Kosimer had quietly told Fritz Croner that if he ever needed a temporary refuge her home was at his disposal.

  “We’re in danger,” Fritz said now. “We’ve got to leave our apartment.” He tried to mask his anxiety, but he could hear it in his voice. Frau Kosimer was his only hope. It was not simply that he and his family would be without a place to go if in the interval she had changed her mind, it was the burden he was placing on another human being. Gentiles who helped Jews in any way—the Nazis called them Judenknechte, lackeys of the Jews—whether they were friends of those they assisted or merchants or public officials, faced fines, imprisonment or even death.

  If the thought of danger to herself crossed Frau Kosimer’s mind, it did not reveal itself in her response. “Then you must come here,” she said at once.

  Early that evening Fritz informed his parents and uncle that he, Marlitt and the baby were going underground. They were appalled. Nothing the Germans could do to them seemed as horrible as the strain and tension of living illegally. They couldn’t imagine living without the papers that, in Nazi Germany, were as necessary to life as food—identity cards, residence permits, work permits, cards that permitted them to buy food and clothing and to walk in the streets, even a postal identification card that enabled them to collect mail. Unexpressed, and yet part of their reaction, was a resistance, as well-bred Germans, to the idea of living with fraudulent papers. History and experience attached a premium to obedience; in Germany one did not walk on the grass, whether a sign proscribed it or not.

  Fritz argued that their only chance for survival was in going underground, but he knew that he wasn’t being persuasive. Illegality was a young person’s game and his parents and uncle were too old to play it. It would demand strong nerves and physical stamina. There would be the constant need to move about; how would his father manage with his crippled leg? And being underground would also demand a meticulous attention to detail, for which none of them had demonstrated the patience. When the Nazis required all Jews to turn in their gold, silver and jewels, it was Fritz, not the others, who had gone to observe the process. Seeing that the receipts listed the items and quantity—“one watch,” “two rings”—but not a description or estimate of value, Fritz had turned in only his inferior pieces and held the good ones back.

  There was, finally, the expense of living underground. Whereas Fritz had been working and hoarding jewels for just this moment, neither his parents nor his uncle had any such resources.

  One matter was unexpressed but weighed on all their minds. For months now Fritz had been supplying his parents and uncle with much of their food. As an “illegal” he would be hard put to support his wife and child. Most of his money would be spent on rent for hiding places.

  Fritz promised his family that he would get in touch with them the moment he had relocated. As soon as they had said goodbye, he and Marlitt took a careful inventory of their clothing, selecting what they knew might have to last them for the duration of the war. Fritz chose the long leather coat, leather trousers and boots that were a holdover from his motorcycling days. Marlitt chose her most practical dress and warmest coat. As soon as they were ready, they walked from their apartment as though they were taking the baby for a stroll. It seemed to both of them that they were escaping from a prison; from this moment forward they would be hunted fugitives.

  That night they slept in armchairs in Frau Kosimer’s apartment. Lane, one year and four months old, slept in her carriage. The next morning Makarow, Fritz’s jeweler friend, found them a flat on Prinzregentenstrasse in Wilmersdorf, a centrally located residential district. The f
lat had been occupied by Jews who had just been deported. It had no furniture and no cooking facilities. The caretaker, whom Fritz knew, told him he could have the apartment only until January 1, 1943, when a non-Jewish family would be moving in. It was a common enough story. The Third Reich had put far more effort into armaments than it had into housing, and the bombings, even at this point, had made an already severe housing shortage so critical that the deportation of Jews had created welcome possibilities for thousands of cramped non-Jewish families. Not only was the Croners’ sanctuary a temporary one but the cost would be four hundred marks, fourteen times what Fritz had been earning per month at the railroad yard. He was staggered. Even with his black market transactions, how long could they last at these prices?

  But Fritz didn’t voice his doubts to Marlitt. He was determined that they would make it. This was their moment of life and no one would take it from them. No one, but no one, would send them from Berlin.

  2

  HANS HIRSCHEL was a scholar and author whose writing had been likened to Thomas Mann’s. Before the Nazi regime he had edited and published an avant-garde literary magazine called Three Corners, whose format was a triangle and whose existence was attributable to the postwar explosion of German creativity that had caused Berlin to be considered the equal of Paris in the esteem of progressive intellectuals. As a member of Berlin’s bohemian elite, Hirschel reveled in the discussions that questioned long-held moral assumptions in public and private life. Never a practicing Jew—he had not even been bar-mitzvahed—he nonetheless took a strong, if critical, interest in religion, and had an impressive academic background in theology as well as philosophy. His dissertation, “The Diabolic in Religion,” presented at the University of Freiburg, had caused chaos among the faculty with its thesis that every religious movement inevitably created its own evil concomitant.

  Hirschel’s weakness in these ominous times was his excessive tolerance and good nature. Even when the faculty rejected the dissertation he refused to become bitter, and although Germany’s universities were notoriously anti-Semitic, he would not attribute his rejection to prejudice. He believed uncritically in people’s goodness and was forever trying to put himself in others’ situations in order to understand their behavior. He refused to take what happened to him personally and treated adversity with detachment. One winter day in the late 1930s he spent twelve hours at forced labor clearing snow from the Kaiserallee. As exhausted as he was the evening, he refused to see the evil of it, saying, “The guards were quite friendly.”

  There were ways, however, in which Hirschel was well suited to the fugitive life he had been leading since February of 1942. He was, to begin with, extremely adaptable. Born to one of Berlin’s first Jewish families, he had lived much of his life in a grand apartment on the very Kaiserallee where he would later work as a slave—an irony that was not lost on him. As an underground Jew he was living in simple circumstances in a small ground-floor flat, cooking for himself and doing his own housework. And then there was his equanimity. Whereas some Jews gave themselves away by their timid manner, looking left and right as though they were afraid of being caught, Hans, tall and thin, with chiseled features punctuated by high-set ears, always seemed calm and relaxed as he walked through the streets, a pleasant smile on his face. For months after he went illegal he would stroll his old neighborhood in daylight, despite the fact that any healthy-looking man in his early forties and out of uniform was suspect. But his self-assurance seemed to dispel the possibility that something was wrong.

  Occasionally he flirted dangerously with trouble, putting much greater stock in his “disguise”—a growth of beard and dark glasses—than it warranted, given his singular physique. One day he would stroll by his old tennis club, where Nazi party members now played; another day he would get a haircut at a barber shop that was known to be a favorite hunting ground for S.S. patrols looking for “illegal” Jews. His worst transgression occurred when, sauntering into the Heidelberger Platz, he chanced upon an old family friend, Hannes Kupper, a stage manager in civilian life who was now in the army and had come to Berlin to arrange for shows for the troops. Kupper gasped when he saw him. “My God,” he whispered, “what are you doing in Berlin? I figured you’d either been killed or made it to England.”

  “Oh, no. I’m quite okay,” Hans replied. “I’m living with Marushka.”

  Kupper cut him off. “For God’s sake, man, don’t tell me where you live.” The point did not need elaboration; as long as Kupper didn’t have the information, no one could force it from him.

  It had been a stupid indiscretion that not only compromised Kupper but jeopardized Hans and the woman who was hiding him. For a while he was too ashamed to tell her what had happened, but when his conscience forced it from him, she became enraged and demanded that he never again go out without her.

  Given his dependent circumstances, it was fortunate for Hirschel that he was accustomed to strong women. He had been raised by a dominating mother; his benefactress, the Countess Maria von Maltzan, was even more overpowering. The descendant of an old, noble Swedish family that had migrated to north Germany centuries before, Maria von Maltzan—Marushka to Hans—was a striking woman whom men found irresistible. “Emancipation” was not a word that would have occurred to her; she had never recognized the supposed inferiority of women, and she was as strong as many men her size and a good deal more active. She was trained in judo, rode horses like a jockey and could swim for miles. She had slim hips and walked with a man’s gait, but she was also feminine enough to enjoy wearing dresses that showed off her well shaped legs.

  She had met Hirschel in 1939 at a soirée given by the proprietress of a boarding school that she had once attended, and from whom Hans had once taken English lessons. She was thirty, Hans was thirty-nine. She was more quick-witted, but he had greater experience and knowledge, and the fact that he was Jewish appealed to her immensely. The wide streak of daring in her complemented her loathing of the Nazis, so that in associating with a Jew in direct violation of the Nazis’ racial laws she was demonstrating her defiance.

  Whatever symbolic value the relationship had for them soon became unimportant; they fell quickly and genuinely in love. But although they were lovers, they didn’t live together—partly out of prudence, partly out of deference to Hans’s mother who was terrified at the prospect of her son’s liaison with an “Aryan” woman. If discovered, it would cause his imprisonment.

  By February 1942, however, so many of the Hirschels’ friends had been deported that neither prudence nor deference was appropriate. Hans moved into Marushka’s flat under a subterfuge concocted by Marushka. He gave a “suicide” note to his mother that said he couldn’t stand what was happening, that he could not support himself and was a burden to her. “If you are alone, perhaps it will be easier,” the note concluded.

  A few days after Hans went into hiding Frau Hirschel wrote the police that Hans had been missing for several days, and enclosed his note. She asked them to drag the Wannsee, a lake within the city in which many Jews had drowned themselves. As Marushka had reckoned, the police had no interest in searching for the body of a missing Jew, and from then on he was listed as dead.

  Marushka’s flat, on the Detmolder Strasse in Wilmersdorf, had once been a store. Marushka had curtained off a big display window and now the front of the store served as a living room. A corridor led past a bedroom and a bath to a well-lit kitchen in which Marushka kept cages of canaries and finches. The kitchen looked onto a small fenced garden, which abutted an adjoining garden in which there was an enormous, graceful chestnut tree.

  When Hans moved in he brought with him a daybed that doubled as a couch. It was a massive boxlike piece built of mahogany, with a lid, hinged on the inside, which could be opened to store bedding. “You know,” Marushka said one day as she gazed at the couch, “that would make a perfect hiding place for you if we ever needed one.”

  “I’d suffocate,” Hans said.

  “No, you would
n’t. We could drill holes in the bottom.”

  Using a hand drill, she made the holes and then covered the underside with a loosely woven linen fabric. Inside the top she fastened a latch, so that when Hans climbed inside he could secure the lid; the pad on top would fall back into place.

  Each morning thereafter, before she went off to her classes at the university—she was working toward a degree in veterinary medicine—Marushka would put a fresh glass of water inside the couch alongside a cough suppressant.

  Although Hans was now living with Marushka, Luzie Hirschel continued to maintain a formidable claim on her son’s allegiance. She was an exquisite woman of medium height, who had been widowed when Hans was a child. Hans’s father had been a judge in Breslau at a time when Jewish judges in Germany were rare. His mother was a Grunfeld, the daughter of a builder, who had left a small fortune to each of his thirteen children on his death. Luzie Hirschel demanded a great deal from Hans, particularly after his sister, four years younger, died of a heart attack while working in Italy. While Luzie never admitted it outright, she seemed to assume that Hans would accompany her if she were deported. The very thought infuriated Marushka, who argued to Hans that if Luzie went alone, she would go to Theresienstadt, where she had a chance of surviving, whereas if they went together, they would be sent to Poland. “Hans, Poland is death,” Marushka insisted.

  She spoke more from premonition than fact, because reports of extermination had not yet reached Berlin, but she knew the Nazis—Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, an ardent party member, was her brother-in-law—and she remembered Hitler’s promise in Mein Kampf to destroy the Jews. She chose to take him at his word.